Despite having now officially left school, I am still taking part in an International Evening on 25th June. Naturally I shall be bringing the India/Pakistan plate to the table! I have a friend who is training in Hindustani classical music and so the two of us have paired up to bring Asia to an English grammar school.
It took us ages to decide on what to do, since mr singer is able to sing Hindustani classical raags, bollywood songs and western songs, and I am able to do Kathak, Bharatanatyam and bollywood. We finally decided on one classical raag, one semi-classical song and one bollywood song...
Raag Jaunpuri will be our main piece, it's a classical Hindustani raag and since I am no musician this is what my dear old friend Wikipedia has to say on it:
Jaunpuri or Javanpuri is a rāga in Hindustani classical music in the Asavari thaat. Some experts like Pandit Omkarnath Thakur consider it indistinguishable from the shuddha rishabh Asavari. The name of the rāga may associates it with places of this name such as Javanpur in Gujrat close to Saurastra region and Jaunpur in northern Uttar Pradesh. Yakshagana raga 'Saurastra' is very close to Javanpuri raga.
The arohana is S R m P d m P d n S' and the avarohana is S' n d P d m P g R S. It is usually performed in the late morning (9AM-12 noon). The Pakad is "m P n d P, m P g, R m g
To this raag I am going to attempt to choreograph something along the lines of a Kathak piece, naturally as a student I don't know if I can call it true Kathak and since my knowledge of Hindustani music is limited I don't know if it will fit with the taal etc. but that's what we started working on and I don't think it's going too badly, it's currently a little bit of an angahar exercise here and a snippet of an amad there, so we shall see how it goes. Interestingly mr singer has never been given a raag book by his guru, but rather he writes all of his raags down by hand, so naturally I though "SNAP PICS FOR THE BLOG!" and voila...
The second piece we've decided on is Madhuban Mein Radika, which I'm told is a semi-classical composition, I haven't started working on a choreography for this yet so that should be fun! Here is a link to mr singer singing it...
Madhuban Mein Radika Nache Re - Sohum Shah
Madhuban Mein Radika Nache Re - Sohum Shah
Then we have the bollywood piece which I believe is going to be Jashn-e-Bahaara from the film Jodhaa Akbar. Two notes to be made on this: firstly, Jodhaa Akbar is an amazing film so please go and watch it, secondly, the entire soundtrack sounds so much better in Tamil in my opinion. So for this piece I'm thinking I'll improvise mainly but it'll be a Kathak, Bharatanatyam, semi-classical piece. T
he vague plan is to show somewhat of a development from pure Hindustani classical through to semi-classical right up to bollywood. Hopefully we pull it off!
It'll be the first time I've actually choreographed something, most of the time when I perform semi-classical/bollywood numbers solo they're completely improvised but I thought if I am trying to represent the world of Indian classical music and dance then I should choreograph something using only Kathak vocabulary and see how it goes. I shall continue updates on this as we progress!
Here's a link to the English translation of the Jashn-e-Bahaara lyrics if you're interested...
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