Moksha: Enlightenment & Liberation - 40th Anniversary Performance

Project: Moksha: Liberation & Enlightenment – an Indian Dance Performance

An Indian Classical dance concert featuring two choreographic works by Malathi Iyengar:

Mustard Seeds (Buddhist Parable)

Legends of Krishna: The Path of the Playful

Each performance is preceded by a brief introduction to the essence of Buddhist and Hindu philosophies

Krishna: The Path of the Playful

Krishna, a popular Hindu deity is the eighth incarnation of Lord Vishnu. Krishna is the epitome of love and virtue.

The performance presents a tapestry of images related to Krishna’s birth, his romance with the cowherd girls, his crusade to K*ll the evil Kamsa, Poothana, and his role as the Pandava prince Arjuna’s charioteer (Partha Sarathi) in the Kurukshetra war that spanned over 18 days. In this capacity, he reveals the divine song, Bhagavad Gita to Arjuna.

Krishna's role in the great Indian epic, The Mahabharatha, is a complex blend of human and divine attributes. In the unfolding saga of the cousins and rivals, Pandavas, and the Kauravas (who fought for the throne of Hastinapur), Krishna appears throughout as a political agent, social reformer, and an ambassador of peace.

When poised in the middle of the war on the battlefield, Arjuna, a great warrior, becomes distraught that he must now fight and K*ll his cousins, uncles, and grand uncles – and refuses to fight. Krishna advises Arjuna on the importance of his duty as a warrior to fight for righteousness. Krishna reveals all his glorious incarnations. He shows Arjuna that he is Lord Narayana (Vishnu). Krishna says - in an altruistic lifestyle, action must be without desire or passion and without any worry about the fruits of the results of one’s actions.

The dramatic moment in the Mahabharata / Bhagavad Gita scene, poses the utmost significant moral question: How should a person act? How should he / she choose between what is right and wrong? Should Arjuna K*ll his own kith and kin, his revered teachers, and elders, against his own conscience, to gain a bit of land? Lord Krishna tries to move Arjuna into action by placing all kinds of arguments and persuasions, from ridiculing to rationalizing, finally to dazzle him with a revelation of himself as the divine, with all his incarnations.

In the end Lord Krishna leaves the choice up to Arjuna to fight the battle. Eventually, Arjuna’s soul, awakened by the teachings of Krishna, becomes the general leading the battle.

Mustard Seeds (Originally Premiered August 4, 1995)

Mustard Seeds is an intercultural dance theatre, inspired by the Buddhist parable – Kisa Gauthami. The incident is drawn from the tale written as an opera-play by the literary scholar K. Shivarama Karanth of Karnataka, India.

The performance depicts a distraught woman, Gauthami, who has lost her only child. Facing the loss of a loved one, she is in total despair and denial. She desperately looks for someone to save her child. She encounters a monk, Ananda, a foremost disciple of Buddha in the outskirts of the village. Gauthami sobbing shares her misfortune and begs for help. Ananda agrees to take her to the abode of his master, Buddha.

After having heard from the grief-stricken and disillusioned woman, Buddha tells Gauthami to fetch Mustard Seeds from a household untouched by mortality.

Gauthami, being naïve, returns to the village and pleads with the village folks for a handful of Mustard Seeds and narrates the conditions placed by Buddha.

She realizes that everyone in the village has lost a loved one sometime in their lives. At this moment, she goes through a transformation. She is caught in the thoughts of the mysterious web of life, death, and the wheel of time.

She sadly returns to Buddha with a renewed awareness and shares her experience.

Buddha consoles the woman with enlightening words of wisdom and preaches the truth. He teaches that neither asceticism nor indulgence is the path to enlightenment. Root cause for all sorrow is the attachment to the earthly things and that detachment is possible only when one extinguishes all desire. Gauthami is overcome with emotion and prepares to face the law common to all mankind.

Venue:

Barnsdall Gallery Theatre, Hollywood, California

Credits:

Presented by: Rangoli Foundation for Art & Culture / Rangoli Dance CompanyArtistic Directors: Malathi Iyengar & Lakshmi Iyengar

Concept and Choreography: Malathi Iyengar

Music: Rajkumar Bharathi & Traditional Compositions

Dancers: Rangoli Dance Company & Guest Performers & Speakers

Host or Publisher Rangoli Dance Company