Center Stage – chronicle of silent verse, photo essay by Subhamita Kaajol Poddar
“Not all have the gift of the gab. Some speak the language of the heart”. This is exactly what I came across sitting on the dance studio in Decker’s lane, Esplanade on a rainy afternoon in August. Buoyant Performing arts, as the name suggests, is a dance group founded by three partners Sidharth Bhardawaj, Saurabh Sureka and Gourav Punjabi, in 2011.
Starting off with dance workshops, “Buoyant” didn’t get so much hyped till in 2012 when they started taking auditions for company dancers to start school at Saurabh Sureka’s place at Salt lake. But with time and growing losses as dance company, the partners as well as the company dancers split, leaving Buoyant with three choreographer, Saurabh Sureka, Ashish Singha and Sayan Debnath.
With passing time, Buoyant branched out to three major centres across Kolkata situated at Hajra, Esplanade and Salt lake. The dance company which once started with three students, grew to seven pupil and now it has more than twenty adults and ten children who are being trained under eminent choreographers, for a succeeding career in dance.
Buoyant is the first dance company in Eastern India to follow Western contemporary dance vocabulary. The company’s main objective is to work with different NGO’s, street kids and disabled, which they did by joining hands with acclaimed NGO’s in Kolkata like C.R.Y, Rotary, etc. Suman Swargi, an eminent Manipuri dancer, joined as a member in 2012 at Buoyant, and also the owner of Sparsh studio, where Buoyant’s classes are held at Esplanade, has made a notable contribution in Buoyant’s growth by organising workshops and projects for the pupil as well as the existing choreographers.
As a photographer, I couldn’t exclude the opportunity to capture a dance performance by a small team of four choreographers, of which three being the major choreographer’s of Buoyant and a Portuguese choreographer, Diniz Sanchez. Diniz is a guest teacher at Buoyant, from Portugal,who is currently doing a workshop on contemporary dance theatre at Buoyant. He along with Saurabh sureka, the creative director of Buoyant, choreographed the act “Imbalance to Balance” that was performed at “Interface- a contemporary dance festival”, organised by Sudarshan, the company owner of Sapphire, which is another dance company in Kolkata. the show took place in a renowned auditorium, Satyajit Ray Mancha (ICCR), situated at Ho Chi Minh Sarani, Kolkata, on the 11th of September.
Starting from the rehearsal at Sparsh studio, proceeding to the green room and finally the stage performance, it was a complete visual and mental treat, a person could get and moments relished. To add more intensity to the performance, the stage lights played an important role altogether in creating a significant drama. The choreography and arrangements left me as well as the audience, awestruck.
In India, where dance forms like kathak, kathakali, bharatnatyam, kuchipudi etc are much in fame, contemporary theatre dance can be a complete taste changer for an art lover. And I consider myself fortunate to be associated with such a group of brilliant dancers and choreographers, who could express their thought process through every move and every expression. This brings me back to the previous notation “Not all have the gift of the gab. Some speak the language of the heart”.
(by Subhamita Kaajol Poddar)
