Choreographer: Urja Desai Thakore
Based on a series of poems and stories, Urja Desai Thakore has created a 60-minute dance performance celebrating the heroism of women in a piece that uses evocative live music, multi-lingual narration and choreography to reenact four individual tales taking place across centuries of female bravery. Pagrav Dance Company: ROOH: Within Her, staged in the Lilian Baylis Studio at Sadler’s Wells, evokes folk heroines and ancient characters with more recent examples of female activism. This ambitious piece sets out to inspire.
Within Her is more successful in conveying certainly the meaning of the classical stories than the ‘everyday heroism’ in dance form, guiding the audience through the dance language being applied to the story of a mother seeking her soldier son on the battlefield. Based on a segment of the Tamil Puranaanooru anthology of poems, Thakore stages the story in full using a bamboo stick to represent different chapters in which the dancer first showcases military skills, wielding the implement like a weapon, as part of a worshipful ritual in which the mother prays for the deliverance of her child and later as the dead child himself which she cradles in her arms. Like Volumnia in Coriolanus, she is gratified that her son has died an honourable death in battle.
Immediately, the show inserts a pre-recorded discussion between a child and adult – which the programme identifies as Thakore and her 12-year-old daughter – discussing the poem and its meaning spoken in Gujarati and English, rapidly shifting between the two. The conversation describes the meaning of the movements with the dancer (also Thakore) performing examples of them again for the audience to explain what we have seen. The conversation turns to the next story, Charan Kanya by Jhaverchand Meghani, about a 14-year-old girl who chases away a lion when the adult men are scared.
The choreography here is equally evocative, Thakore imitating the clawing paws of the approaching lion with spreading fingers, stalking the stage as though hunting while stomping four beats in quick succession to imply the threat posed by the creature. The superb musicians Gurdain Singh Rayatt, Kaviraj Singh, Prathap Ramachandra and Vijay Venkat Rahman abandon their instruments to act as the frightened men, providing a chanting soundtrack as they back away from the invisible creature and Thakore takes centre stage, scaring it off with more heroic bamboo work.
The final two pieces take contemporary stories, family stories from Thakore’s history, focusing on the social bravery of two sisters who raise a child together, which blends into the Women of Uttarakhand by Karthika Naï, who defend the forest with their bodies. The narration here is patchy, and for those unfamiliar with either tale, it is not always easy to grasp their meaning or the significance of the choreographic choices to represent each one. The broad interpretation of female power and determination is helpful, yet the non-specialist audience members need a little more guidance on how these fit together.
Narration is both a help and a hindrance for Within Her, giving partial explanations for some aspects of the performances that should come almost entirely from the dance itself, so a tighter focus on fewer stories and more time to develop them might help. But the music is extraordinary, and Thakore’s compelling performance is its own act of bravery, making space for the forgotten importance of women’s narratives in heroization rituals.
Runs until24 April 2025
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Forgotten women
