Impresionante puesta en escena. La música, la forma, la profundidad, la religión. Una obra de arte.
The Manganiyar Seduction Musicians from Rajasthan, India, led by Daevo Khan, at the Rose Theater.
By STEVE SMITH
Published: November 23, 2010
Over the course of the White Light Festival at Lincoln Center, the notion of music as a conduit to spirituality has taken a variety of forms: individual contemplation, communal praise, the physical discipline of dance, a rock star’s beatific charisma. With “The Manganiyar Seduction,” which arrived belatedly at the Rose Theater on Monday night after a visa-related delay, came still another facet of spirituality: communion with God achieved in a manner embracing the sensual and the ecstatic.
This rapturous approach to the eternal — exemplified by the poetry of Rumi and Hafez; the qawwali tradition popularized by the Pakistani singer Nusrat Fateh Ali Khan; and the stupendous music of Morocco’s Sufi brotherhoods — has touched many a Western lay person through the fervor and delight involved in its expression. “The Manganiyar Seduction,” a 70-minute theatrical presentation conceived by the Indian director Roysten Abel, appeals partly for similar reasons.
The soul of Mr. Abel’s presentation is traditional music preserved and performed by the Manganiyars, a caste of hereditary singers and instrumentalists based in the Indian state of Rajasthan. Though the community is Muslim, it embraces Hindu deities and festivals. Accordingly in Mr. Abel’s work, two shorter songs — “Halariya,” a Hindu celebration of Krishna’s birth, and “Neendarli,” a traditional expression of a wife’s love for her husband — are woven into the fabric of “Alfat Un Bin In Bin,” a Sufi devotional based on poetry by Bulleshah.
The 38 musicians, all men in turbans and robes, and all Muslim apart from one Hindu, sat or kneeled in red-draped cubicles, stacked in four tiers and illuminated when their occupants performed, an arrangement inspired by the red-light district of Amsterdam. Opening with a lonely wail and drone played on a throaty bowed kamancheh, the music flowed in waves of melismatic singing, shimmering bowed sarangi, fluttering murli (flutes), pulsating dhols (drums), a brilliantly twangy morchang (jew’s harp) and other instruments, surging to powerful climaxes before subsiding to build anew.
Since eye contact among the players was precluded by the compartments, more elaborate portions of “The Manganiyar Seduction” were coordinated by Daevo Khan, who served as a conductor, a dancer and at one point a jaw-dropping soloist on castanets. In one sense the visual metaphor was appropriate; even when voices and instruments formed dense, teeming ensembles, every contribution still registered distinctly — less a matter of isolation than one of style.
Another implication of the brothel-inspired set — a packaging of otherness into exotica readily consumed by the open-minded cultural tourist — went unexamined. The writer Anastasia Tsioulcas raised the issue in a brief interview with Mr. Abel printed in the program, but he deflected the question; what mattered, Mr. Abel said, was the visceral experience.
Perhaps he is right. Though many audience members around me were frozen in rapt attention during the performance, I found it impossible to sit still, so buoyant and compelling were the work’s lively rhythmic currents. And after a thunderous finale, during which the set’s lights coursed in waves like a Broadway billboard or a football-stadium display, the instantaneous ovation that followed was as tumultuous as what had come just before.
It was during that final segment, just before a brief, tranquil encore, that one last facet of the experience came into focus. For all its noble intent in bringing the Manganiyars’ eloquent music to a global audience, Mr. Abel’s show is potentially just as much a populist spectacle. Despite its elevated source material, you could imagine “The Manganiyar Seduction” settling comfortably into some Off Broadway house around the corner from “Fuerzabruta” or “Stomp.”
Seriously, think of it: 37 Muslims (and one Hindu) enchanting audiences with elevating, devotional sounds nightly. Now that is a seductive idea.
By STEVE SMITH
Published: November 23, 2010
Over the course of the White Light Festival at Lincoln Center, the notion of music as a conduit to spirituality has taken a variety of forms: individual contemplation, communal praise, the physical discipline of dance, a rock star’s beatific charisma. With “The Manganiyar Seduction,” which arrived belatedly at the Rose Theater on Monday night after a visa-related delay, came still another facet of spirituality: communion with God achieved in a manner embracing the sensual and the ecstatic.
This rapturous approach to the eternal — exemplified by the poetry of Rumi and Hafez; the qawwali tradition popularized by the Pakistani singer Nusrat Fateh Ali Khan; and the stupendous music of Morocco’s Sufi brotherhoods — has touched many a Western lay person through the fervor and delight involved in its expression. “The Manganiyar Seduction,” a 70-minute theatrical presentation conceived by the Indian director Roysten Abel, appeals partly for similar reasons.
The soul of Mr. Abel’s presentation is traditional music preserved and performed by the Manganiyars, a caste of hereditary singers and instrumentalists based in the Indian state of Rajasthan. Though the community is Muslim, it embraces Hindu deities and festivals. Accordingly in Mr. Abel’s work, two shorter songs — “Halariya,” a Hindu celebration of Krishna’s birth, and “Neendarli,” a traditional expression of a wife’s love for her husband — are woven into the fabric of “Alfat Un Bin In Bin,” a Sufi devotional based on poetry by Bulleshah.
The 38 musicians, all men in turbans and robes, and all Muslim apart from one Hindu, sat or kneeled in red-draped cubicles, stacked in four tiers and illuminated when their occupants performed, an arrangement inspired by the red-light district of Amsterdam. Opening with a lonely wail and drone played on a throaty bowed kamancheh, the music flowed in waves of melismatic singing, shimmering bowed sarangi, fluttering murli (flutes), pulsating dhols (drums), a brilliantly twangy morchang (jew’s harp) and other instruments, surging to powerful climaxes before subsiding to build anew.
Since eye contact among the players was precluded by the compartments, more elaborate portions of “The Manganiyar Seduction” were coordinated by Daevo Khan, who served as a conductor, a dancer and at one point a jaw-dropping soloist on castanets. In one sense the visual metaphor was appropriate; even when voices and instruments formed dense, teeming ensembles, every contribution still registered distinctly — less a matter of isolation than one of style.
Another implication of the brothel-inspired set — a packaging of otherness into exotica readily consumed by the open-minded cultural tourist — went unexamined. The writer Anastasia Tsioulcas raised the issue in a brief interview with Mr. Abel printed in the program, but he deflected the question; what mattered, Mr. Abel said, was the visceral experience.
Perhaps he is right. Though many audience members around me were frozen in rapt attention during the performance, I found it impossible to sit still, so buoyant and compelling were the work’s lively rhythmic currents. And after a thunderous finale, during which the set’s lights coursed in waves like a Broadway billboard or a football-stadium display, the instantaneous ovation that followed was as tumultuous as what had come just before.
It was during that final segment, just before a brief, tranquil encore, that one last facet of the experience came into focus. For all its noble intent in bringing the Manganiyars’ eloquent music to a global audience, Mr. Abel’s show is potentially just as much a populist spectacle. Despite its elevated source material, you could imagine “The Manganiyar Seduction” settling comfortably into some Off Broadway house around the corner from “Fuerzabruta” or “Stomp.”
Seriously, think of it: 37 Muslims (and one Hindu) enchanting audiences with elevating, devotional sounds nightly. Now that is a seductive idea.
Fuente: nytimes.com
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