Tandava – the cosmic dance of Shiva – symbolising time; existence; non-existence and so much more. Piah Dance Company from India collaborate with Scottish guitarist Simon Thacker to create a gorgeous show filled with Hindu theology.
Beautiful to watch with fabulous music
The ladies rush out from backstage with gorgeous traditional skirts that exaggerate their moves beautifully, The first dance they perform represents Shiva and the endless cycles of life and everything else. To underscore this, Thacker uses the traditional south Asian chromatic scale when playing guitar using both major and minor notes to communicate chaos and confusion. Intense yet also soft and the girls hit every move with power.
The second dance a little more linear with a lot of repetition in movement and music. Thacker gives us many crescendoes as the dancers performer canon moments as they follow each others lead.
We then go into the dance of the Enchanted Forrest; the story of the nymph who lived on the river, distracted the demons from gaining the elixir of immortality. Thacker improvises for this piece using a loop machine to build up the sound also using an echo effect to simulate ripples of the water which I thought was awesome. In this piece the girls danced in synchronicity with endless twirling and fluid arm movements.
And the finally, Samhara, this dance was much more aggressive, sister to the first piece this finale was much more linear, with stronger movements and stomping this dance represents the urge to reach a destination.
This show is very beautiful to watch with fabulous music from Simon Thacker. There’s a organic feel to the show and the dancers did not go wrong once, moving with great elegance.
