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Music and dance of India featured Wednesday
Enjoy a unique evening of Kathak dance and music from Northern India Wednesday as the Greencastle Summer Music Festival continues at 7:30 p.m. in Gobin Church.
Admission is free. The GSMF concerts are supported by an endowment at the Putnam County Community Foundation and donations from individuals and businesses, including the Inn at DePauw and Doc’s Inn.
Frequent GSMF performer saxophonist George Wolfe, the Ball State music and peace studies emeritus professor, has immersed himself in the music of India in recent years. He has created this program with his colleague Anindita Sen, the founder, president and artistic director of Nrityangan Kathak Academy in Carmel, and tabla (Indian drum) artist Amudhan Venkateshwaran.
Wolfe, assisted by cellist Eric Edberg, the GSMF founding artistic director, will present an introduction to Indian music, followed by dance by members of the Nrityangan Kathak Academy, concluding with a performance of the great jazz saxophonist Paul Desmond’s “Take Five” — a collaboration of Kathak dance and jazz.
Kathak is a north Indian classical dance form, long nurtured in the holy precincts of the Hindu temples. Katha means stories, and the dancers are storytellers of mythological tales through mimes, hand movements and facial expressions. From the 16th century onward, Kathak was patronized in the courts of the Mughal emperors, so this dance form blends Hindu spiritualism and aspects of Persian dances. The dancers wear hundreds of bells (ghungroo) on their feet, combining fast footwork, intricate, graceful hand movements and repetitive pirouettes.
Anindita Sen is the founder, president and artistic director of the Nrityangan Kathak Academy, a dance school in Carmel which has specialized in this art form for 19 years and currently has 80 students enrolled. She trained in the Lucknow gharana of Kathak in Kolkata, India, for more than 15 years. Even though Anindita is a scientist by profession, Nrityangan arose from her innate passion for Kathak. She has been imparting Kathak training since 1994 to students in Iowa, North Carolina and currently in Carmel. Anindita and her students are active in the Indianapolis cultural community with participation in several cultural events. Within the last 17 years she and/or her students have performed at the North America Bengali Conference (Madison Square Garden, NYC). India Association of Indianapolis Diwali event at the Murat and India Day festival, Indiana State Fair, Indiana International Festival, Asian American Alliance Asian Fest, DePauw Multicultural and Community Life event, Hindu Temple of Central Indiana events, Sangam by Lilly India Network, Navrang, Children’s Museum of Indianapolis, Jackson Center for conducive education annual fundraising gala, Indiana Deaf School, Heartland Film Festival gala, Eli Lilly Multicultural event, Tri-State Durga Puja, collaborations with Gregory Hancock Dance Theater to name a few.
In 2014, Anindita was instrumental in organizing and hosting a live performance by Padmavibhushan Pandit Birju Maharajji, Saswati Sen and other members of the Kalashram (New Delhi) troupe. Anindita has also partnered with Clowes Memorial Hall of Butler University to bring Ragamala Dance Theater from Minneapolis to Indianapolis in 2015.
Between 2011 and 2015, Anindita served as a faculty member at the Academy of Gregory Hancock Dance Theater (AGHDT) and is currently vice president of the board of directors. Anindita was a director of regulatory affairs at Eli Lilly and Co. for 18 years.
Amudhan Venkateshwaran, a scientist by profession, is an avid music lover who started learning classical tabla at the age of 10 from his Guru Shri Anil Rai in Pilani, Rajasthan in India. While he grew up in North India primarily training in Hindusthani music, Amudhan is heavily influenced by his family background in Carnatic music, giving him this unique opportunity to indulge in both genres of Indian classical music. He moved to USA in 1999 to pursue higher education. Since then he has had the privilege to accompany several well known visiting professional artists from India. Apart from playing in the Indian classical music setting, Amudhan enthusiastically explores the role of tabla in western musical genres including jazz, country and blues. He has been an active member of various jazz bands and the Carnatic fusion band Jugal Vandy. Amudhan has been collaborating with Nrityangan Kathak Academy for about five years.
The festival will continue on Wednesday, June 28 with a return to Western classical music: Mussorgsky’s enthralling masterpiece “Pictures at an Exhibition,” performed by pianist Tony Weinstein, followed by the sonata for piano “four hands” by Romantic composer Anton Rubenstein, in which Weinstein will be joined by his wife, Tatiana Lokhina.