The fact that four of India's richest dance traditions are brought together in Sangeetham should be sufficient reason to welcome this four-day festival of music and dance. Yet while it's good for London audiences to see rarely performed styles such as Odissi and Kuchipudi, the festival's opening performance, a solo recital by Shovana Narayan, raises the question of whether the Wells is the right venue for such an event.
Narayan is rightly advertised as one of Kathak's finest exponents. Calm, almost placid in her expression, she moves with unexpected power to impose her own semi-playful, semi-combative will on to the music. With her fingers richly teasing out melodies, her arms shaping the phrasing and her feet maintaining an insistent delicate pulse, the effect she has is both masterful and intensely feminine; it is the dance of a matriarch.
Narayan is a performer of fascinating range. In her longer narrative pieces, she departs from the usual swaggering gods and warriors to dramatise the tender ecstasies of Krishna's nursemaid or the conflicted heartache of Buddha's wife, abandoned after her husband has swanned off to seek enlightenment. Even in the section where Narayan plays with pure rhythm, she tells stories. In each "study", she take a complicated pattern of beats and refracts it into a dazzle of moves around her body, making the flicker of an eyebrow, the ripple of an arm carry the rhythm just as emphatically as a sharp stamp or a whipping turn. But equally vivid is the imagery, the zig-zagging of a thunder storm, the coil of snakes around Shiva's wrist and neck that turns a formal exercise into poetry. There is no question, Narayan can fill a stage. Yet charismatic as she is, the scale of the venue thwarts real intimacy, and given the slow pacing of her recital, Narayan's hold on the audience stretches very thin.
It's not that the Wells shouldn't play host to Indian dance, but as a venue it probably demands a punchier - and less purist - style of presentation.
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