How Odissi became popular in Japan

The colours are diffused, the shots are blurred, and the rumble of a train often punctuates the two-hour recording. Yet what the home video captures is priceless – a filmed document of the early days of Odissi dance in Japan.

The hazy footage shows a dance class at a bunka (culture) centre in Oimachi, southern Tokyo, led by the Odissi guru Kumkum Lal. She is putting the finishing touches to Moksh, the dance that marks the end of an Odissi performance. “Moichi do, motto hayaku,” she urges the class, encouraging them to try again, this time faster.

More than 40 years after that VHS moment, a similar scene plays out at Lal’s south Delhi home. She watches Ayako Sakina rehearse the timeless love poetry of Geeta Govinda, playing the distraught Radha in Yahi Madhava, Yahi Keshava. For Lal, the abhinaya (expressive gestures) has to be perfect – the dismay in the tilt of Radha’s head, the reproach in her fingers as she counts the nail marks on her lover’s chest, the mix of rage and resignation. “Hyogen o wasure naide kodasai (please stay consistent with the expressions),” she tells Ayako.

Ayako was among the five Japanese dancers who presented an Odissi performance, Purva Samira (Eastern Breeze), in Delhi on December 6. Sharing the stage with her were Sachiko Murakami, Haruko Tanaka, Kaori Naka and Yukie Satto. In a sense, their performance marked an interesting point in a cultural journey that began in that bunka classroom.

Today, Odissi is a hugely popular dance form in Japan and much of the credit for this goes to Lal, the first to live there and teach it full-time for four years. She began in the kitchen of her Oimachi home, instructing her sole student, the late Asako Takami, who would go on to emerge as a cult figure and guru of the form. From those humble beginnings, the numbers grew rapidly, spanning generations.

“I am now a ‘grandmother’ in that sense, because the students of my Japanese students are now on the Odissi stage,” Lal said with a laugh.

She is quick to correct anyone who says she “took” the dance to Japan. It was, she argues, an “accident of history”: her husband had been posted to Tokyo with a public sector undertaking and she arrived at a time when Indophilia was soaring and Odissi was still unknown in Japan.

What Lal achieved in her four years in Japan was much more than mere serendipity. What she downplays is the sheer dedication, hard work and unflagging enthusiasm she poured into transforming Odissi into a phenomenon in the country. By the time she left, Odissi had gained a foothold across Japan: Osaka, Kyoto, Fukuoka, Hokkaido and Tokyo all had dancers of the style, many of whom would go on to open their own schools or travel to India for further training.

The arrival of her own guru, the legendary Kelucharan Mohapatra, in 1986 further ignited the fire. A dancer of extraordinary artistry, his tour with Lal across Japan – including dramatic performances at a Noh theatre and at the avant garde Studio 200 in the Seibu Department Store in Ikebukuro – left a lasting imprint on dance lovers.

Many of these singular moments in Odissi’s journey in Japan in the 1980s remain preserved in private archives – documents, photographs and videography – much of it the work of Lal’s husband, poet and scholar Ashok Lal. Seen from today’s era of insularity, it appears as a magical period of cultural exchange, exploration and shared wonder.

Grand disciples

Haruko Tanaka, now based in California, is one of Lal’s “grand-disciples”, having trained under her first student, Asako Takami. In her unpublished research paper, The Odissi Scene in Japan, Tanaka summarises the arrival and rapid rise of the dance form in Japan.

“There is a grace and subtlety to Odissi that had great appeal for the Japanese sensibility, it was a natural fit for us, even more than Bharatanatyam,” she said. “The ideas of dedication, devotion to a guru, finding divinity in all nature – these are all familiar and dear to us in both Buddhist and Shinto faith. Just like Odissi has its roots in the Mahari and Gotipua traditions of temple dancers, we too have the dedicated Kagura dancers at Shinto temples.”

In the decades preceding the 1980s, writes Tanaka, sporadic elements of Indian performing arts had already appeared in Japan. The Sakakibara Dance Foundation, established by Kiitsu Sakakibara, who had studied at Shantiniketan, was one early example. Ravi Shankar and Kathakali exponents in the 1950s and 1960s were others.

Sanjukta Panigrahi was the first to perform Odissi at the Osaka Expo in 1970, writes Tanaka. She followed it up with another performance in 1983 with her guru, Kelucharan Mohapatra. In 1979, Madhavi Mudgal performed there too. All these brief glimpses of Odissi had left youngsters like Asako Takame, Yumiko Tanaka and Ayako Sakina utterly smitten and keen to learn.

It was into this vibrant cultural atmosphere that Kumkum Lal arrived in 1982. At that time, she was one of Mohapatra’s foremost disciples and a highly trained dancer with two decades of experience. “I had no idea what I was going to do with Odissi when I went to Japan,” she recalled. “I carried a recording of Odissi music and my dance costumes, but other than that I had no plans whatsoever.”

A chance call from arts scholar Suresh Awasthi, who was in Tokyo briefly, set the wheels in motion. He was giving a talk on Indian arts at Plan B, an avant garde performance space, and invited Lal to join him in delivering a lecture demonstration on Odissi. In the audience that day was Ryosen Kono, a Buddhist priest and an India scholar, who would become a steadfast supporter of Lal’s work in Japan. Also present was Asako Takami, whose passion for Odissi would soon lead her to become Lal’s first student.

In her research, Tanaka quotes her guru’s first impression of Lal’s performance: “I was very shocked that one human body can change space and energy. I didn’t think I could do that with my body, but I wanted to. Right after this performance, I met my teacher, KumKum Lal....I went to her place and said I wanted to study Odissi.”

Lal, taken aback but eager to embark on a new journey, began teaching. The floors of her home were covered with tatami mats, so classes were initially held in her kitchen, the only space with vinyl flooring. Word spread and soon the tiny space was no longer enough.

Her students rented the Oimachi bunka centre and classes multiplied to two hours, four times a week, as Lal herself began learning Japanese language. Armed with a jisho (dictionary), she would take her classes.

“I taught as I had learnt from guruji, in the old methodology with 24 steps and arasas (small pieces of dance in a systemised taal pattern) that he had set up,” Lal recalled. “I made sure the senior students learnt enough Devanagri to understand the phonetics of the bols and Sanskrit used in dance texts. It was a struggle for them to get syllables like ‘karhtaka’ to roll off the Japanese tongue. But they were passionately dedicated students, with Asako eventually giving up her job to focus solely on Odissi.”

Among Lal’s students, apart from Ayako and Asako, Kaori Higo, Minako Morita and Kaoru Katori went on to make a mark. The ripple effect brought even more dancers: Ayako’s classes in Osaka, Kyoto and Tokyo attracted students like Yumiko Chatani, Kazuko Yasunobu and Masako Ono, among others. Many of these dancers would further their journey in India under luminaries such as Mohapatra, Gangadhar Pradhan and Ramani Ranjan Jena.

The buzz around Odissi was growing loud enough for impresarios to take note. One such group, Office Asia, led by Minageshi Yuki, organised performances for Lal at venues across Kyoto, Hyogo and Tokyo, including the prestigious Aoyama Enkei Theatre.

Everyday inspiration

A major turning point came with the 1986 visit of Lal’s guru, Mohapatra. An artist with indescribable grace and wonder at all things new and unexplored, he further propelled the Odissi wave in Japan. Some priceless snippets of his trip are archived at pad.ma (Public Access Digital Media Archive).

Lal’s association with her guru went back to 1963, a time when Odissi had just started to emerge outside Orissa. Seven years of intensive training in Delhi and Odisha culminated in her manch pravesh (stage debut) in the capital.

A decade later, Lal moved to Bombay for three years, where she helped organise intensive workshops by Mohapatra at the National Centre for Performing Arts. The institution became a crucible for much of his fresh creative work, including the lyrical Kishora Chandrananda Champu and Ramayana.

Odissi dancer Ileana Citaristi, in her biography The Making of a Guru: Kelucharan Mohapatra, His Life and Times, remarks on the highly eclectic sources that shaped his celebrated abhinaya. His inspiration often came from close observation of everyday life – from the body language of women at household chores to, famously, visualising a posture from the way a student’s mother sat while cutting an areca nut for paan.

This spontaneity gave his dance a universality that transcended barriers of language, as the Japan experience demonstrated. In her annotations for the pad.ma archival videos, dance scholar Ranjana Dave describes the remarkable performance he and Lal presented at a Noh theatre in Tokyo:

“With a wooden stage to one end of a long, curved walkway (hashigakari), with beautiful pillars intersecting this space, performing Odissi at a Noh theatre was an enchanting experience, especially because Guruji used the pillars to great effect in his ashtapadis. The musicians sat at the back. There is a particularly delightful moment – scheduled to dance Yahi madhava with Kumkum, Guruji plays the mardala for her entry and an extended section where Radha waits for Krishna. As dawn approaches, Radha is in despondent sleep; now, Guruji stops playing the mardala, divests himself of the shawl that covers his upper body, rotates once in the confined space behind the mardala; now holding a flute, he has become Krishna and walks around a pillar, leaning beyond it to peer at Radha as his transformation from the one behind the mardala to Krishna completes itself.”

The visit proved to be a landmark in more ways than one. It resulted in a highly prized Odissi dance music record released by the Japan Victor Company, featuring the musicians who toured with the dancers. Mohapatra himself played percussion on the record, which, Lal notes, still surfaces in unexpected corners of the world, including Europe.

The unprecedented documentation of the visit was also due to Mohapatra’s fondness for electronic gadgets. While in Tokyo, he acquired a video camera to record his choreographies. “He had a very good memory,” Lal recalled, “but this allowed him to preserve his compositions for posterity. It became a great asset for his students, and remains an important reference for dancers today.”

Four years may not seem a long time, but for Lal it was a deeply enriching experience. “I had never taught till then,” she said. “Japan made me a teacher. And I learnt from the diligence, dedication and patience of my students. It forged lifelong relationships as a guru and a person.”

Malini Nair is a culture writer and senior editor based in New Delhi. She can be reached at writermalini@gmail.com.