Hyderabad Arts Festival Season 5 featured a repeat performance of ‘Porous Earth’ a dance interpretation of the poetic work of senior IPS officer Tejdeep Kaur Menon.
Choreographed by guru Hemamalini Arni, ‘Porous Earth’ is the journey of a river portrayed through contemporary Bharatanatyam. In the thematic dance presentation, dancer Kiranmayee Madupu portrayed the voice of the river gorgeously. The presentation begins with the ‘Unchristened river flying across craggy slopes, another stream of melting ice to sink, into Porous Earth or vaporise into the hot sun’.Kiranmayee enacted men tottering on the bridges splendidly, when she came to the verse, ‘Man now needed bridges to girdle me. Forced me to declare my birth, with the umbilicus intact. The dancer in Kiranmayee came out when she depicted the fish and storks and the sages and several others, who use the river for their various needs. Beautifully describing the journey of a river and its happiness in full glow came the saddened part which is witnessed today. Dirtying our rivers and stopping their free flow by man’s mindless hunger for the moolah.
The river cries that ‘No deer comes to wet its lips, no nests sway from an overhanging bush …’ if we don’t care for our nature, very soon these will become just pages of history and imagination. Full marks to the guru, for splendidly highlighting Shankaracharya’s Ayigiri Nandini to appease Goddess Durga in describing the river’s angst for human pollution. The presentation ends with the river meeting her destiny, by merging into the sea, to attain salvation.
In the hour-long presentation, Tejdeep Kaur Menon’s ‘Porous Earth’ addressed various compelling issues of society like water pollution and women empowerment. Speaking after the dance ballet, an emotion-choked Tejdeep Kaur Menon said that she had written the poem in 2003, in one sitting. “When I wrote the poem, people felt it was the story of a young girl as I was a champion of women empowerment. Indeed this poem ‘Porous Earth’ is a double-edged sword. It has been penned with great anguish,” she said.
‘Porous Earth’ is part of her ‘Minnamini’ collection, which forms the third anthology of poems.