World Autism Awareness Day: Odissi-Bharatanatyam jugalbandi portrays life of a mother and her autistic daughter

Dancer Sandhya Manoj’s Prerna:The Inspiration is an Odissi-Bharatanatyam jugalbandi that portrays the life of a mother and her autistic daughter. It will be staged in Kochi on April 2, World Autism Awareness Day

Every figment of creative work is born from a spark of inspiration. For Odissi dancer Sandhya Manoj, it came from a mother. Once, after a dance recital in Malaysia, where Sandhya was based at the time, a woman from the audience walked up to her and asked if she could create a piece on her story.

Intrigued, Sandhya listened. The woman, a classical dance aficianado, had been following Sandhya’s work keenly. Mother to an autistic girl, she wanted Sandhya to portray her life story through dance. “It was a rare request, but I was drawn to her story. I started talking to her and I decided to attempt something that would capture this ‘ordinary’ woman’s extraordinary life,” says Sandhya.

Her production, Prerna : The Inspiration, is based on the mother-daughter duo and will be staged in Kochi on April 2, World Autism Day.

When Sandhya started working on the project, she knew full well that it would be a challenge to adapt such a subject into the vocabulary of dance. “Creating a narrative in classical dance was a challenge, as I didn’t have any reference points. I knew we had to come up with a completely new range of emotions,” says Sandhya. She set to work on the choreography, while constantly communicating with the mother and daughter whose story she was portraying. She took on board a Bharatanatyam artiste Krithika Ramachandran to play the daughter’s part while she played the mother.

“After one and a half years of co-ordination and practice, Prerana: The Inspiration was complete. It has been one of the most interesting concepts I had ever worked on. I knew that by telling this story, we were not just talking about one mother-daughter duo, but it would resonate with many others as well. Since we are portraying the larger idea of inclusion, I wanted to have a blend of genres, languages and even the dance aesthetic,” says Sandhya.

The lyrics for the music are a mix of Malayalam, English, Hindi, Tamil and Sanskrit. The one-hour-15-minute performance would be accompanied by live music.

“The reason why I wanted to make it a jugalbandi was to convey the gap between the mother and the autistic child and yet, how they connect. In the larger perspective, the onus is on us to try and understand the world of autistic people and learn to adapt ourselves,” she says.