Pallavi & Space is Chowk Artistic Director Raka Maitra’s attempt to create dialogic contact between the abstract space of classical dance and the concrete, interior, space of the National Museum of Singapore Gallery Theatre.
Working well within the conventions of the traditional Indian dance of Odissi, Maitra’s choreography navigates abstract spaces constructed through rhythmic, melodic and geometric interventions of the form on the performer’s body. The pallavi that emerges is an elaboration of these abstract spaces, nested within the peculiar performance space that is the Gallery Theatre. Dance, essentially, is movement between abstract and concrete space, and time. It may also be, as in the case of Pallavi & Space, the flow between the old and the new.