Lilian Baylis Theatre at Sadler’s Wells
March 10, 2017
Charlotte Kasner
The opening Echoes by Aditi Mangaldas, a classical kathak work, transports the audience into the sublime. An intensely personal piece, it also invites the audience into Odedra’s journey through life. Strings of bells (ghungroo) hang in the upstage left corner, lit into effulgent gold. Some are strewn across the stage, their tails like straw on a barn floor catching the dying light of a late summer afternoon. The black and gold of Odedra’s dhoti makes him at once one with the environment as he swoops rolls and undulates in his dance.
Suddenly his attention snaps to the upstage bells as a string drops to the floor. Singly, the small discs are nothing, but strung in multitudes they make the sound of a thousand sleighs on a snowy steppe, even though their origin is in heat and dust. Odedra folds in on himself in quiet contemplation, like a piece of inward origami, then bursts into whirling activity, his body fluid within the confines of the classicism that is kathak. He slowly winds the strings round his ankles, clearing the stage, the call of the bells answered, the dance form complete. At one point, Odedra somehow managed to delineate a duple rhythm with his feet whilst sustaining an ostinato in triplicate with the bells around his ankles.
The kathakars are nomads and storytellers and Echoes is the story of a journey of self-discovery which the audience are warmly invited to contemplate. It is a mature and subtle work that is oddly satiating, not leaving the audience wanting more but leaving them contented.

Photo Sean Goldthorpe
Odedra’s own I Imagine could not be more of a contrast. Whereas Echoes spoke biographical volumes by using depth, physicality and nuance, I Imagine hits the audience over the head like a biographical sledgehammer. The gag of a man trapped inside his case would have been funnier at a third of the length, but as it was, a few nervous titters escaped from the front row as limbs punched and poked.
Like many of a mixed cultural background (think Lenny Henry’s West Indian women or Akram Khan in Desh – back at Sadler’s Wells later this season), Odedra is adept at invoking his parents and grandparents, switching in the blink of an eye from an ageing, homesick Indian patriarch to London boy, all estuary accent and assimilation.
Why though, did he feel that we needed to see their images as masks which he carried round in a suitcase like so many ghoulish severed heads? His past, future and present are literally embodied in him and better to trust the audience – and himself- to understand that.
The hammer blows are compounded by Sabrina Mahfouz’s repetitive soundtrack, disembodied, random words and phrases being thrown at us like numbers bouncing up in a lottery draw. One phrase in particular stuck: the grandfather stating time and time again that the rain here is not purposeful like that of the Indian monsoon. There speaks a man who has never spent hours on a windswept, sodden hillside in an English winter, miles from home, the rain so purposeful that it insinuates itself into every previously dry crevice.
There is a lot of carting around of, banging of and stacking of suitcases and extraneous movement in the middle which, although it illustrates Odedra’s extraordinarily pliant physique, adds nothing to the narrative. His mastery of isolations could be put to much better use.
The evening did take a wrong turn in the second half but, in Echoes, Odedra’s persona filled the stage. With more of the same and similar, he could easily fill the main house. It is to be hoped that he has more opportunity to work with other choreographers who can extend his focus outwards.