Ten Years of Celebrating South Asia

Weeks of planning--and ten years of history--came to fruition this past weekend as the South Asian Association (SAA) celebrated the 10th anniversary of Ghungroo, an annual show of South Asian and American culture.

Dancing, singing, poetry reading and humorous skits blended the traditional South Asian experience with the modern South Asian-American experience in four sold-out shows at the Agassiz Theatre from Thursday to Saturday night.

SAA co-president Uttam K. Tambar '00 describes Ghungroo as a show that bridges gaps between club members as well as between members of the larger College community.

"It's the one single event [of the SAA] that brings members together," he says. "Ghungroo is priceless in terms of what it means to our organization. It's the main way to represent our community. The audience can get to know us through the show and the acts."

"It's amazing how many people come and take something away from it," he adds.

Cast member Treeny Ahmed '01 says Ghungroo aims to integrate traditional and modern aspects of South Asian culture.

"A lot of acts did have that fusion," she says. "It was an eye-opener to show [people] what traditional acts are like, and that's why Ghungroo is so different from other cultural shows on campus."

Ten Years of Change

While Gunghroo--which gets its name from the bells worn around the dancers' ankles--has been fusing the modern and the traditional for the last 10 years, Tambar says this year's show presented the most diverse selection of acts in Ghungroo history.

"In terms of choosing acts, the directors really did a great job," says Tambar, who performed in the show's interpretive dance. "If we call ourselves a South Asian show, we should try to represent all of South Asian culture, and the directors did that."

This year's acts ranged from traditional "Bharata Natyam" dancing to the performance of a song from the Hindi movie "Dil Se," which featured a mixture of modern and semi-classical music.

Ashwin Vasan '99, who has co-directed the last two Ghungroo productions, says the show has gradually evolved to a point where it can better represent a wider variety of South Asian regions, from past to present time.

"A lot of cultural shows on [other] college campuses about South Asia...are very specific," Vasan says. "We wanted to be more inclusive, with modern acts that a lot of people can identify with, and we also wanted the more traditional aspect."

"We want to ensure that the audience and the cast experience is broad-ranged," he adds.

To that end, the show's directors say Ghungroo was modified this year in order to pack as much as possible into just a few hours. Changes included eliminating most voice-over narration between acts. Instead, descriptions of the acts were included in the printed program.

Vasan says the written descriptions better conveyed contextual details about the songs and dances, which the show's organizers feel are important for the audience to know.

And by eliminating the inter-act narration, Tambar says the show's producers were able to introduce new elements to keep the audience entertained. While performers set up for upcoming acts behind the thick red curtain of the Agassiz stage or quietly prepared in the wings, cast members--and the occasional member of the tech crew--alternately performed humorous skits and read poetry.

"We've always done skits, but this year we had lots of stuff between acts," Tambar says. "One comment I heard was that no one was bored at any time during the show--every second was exciting."

In the show's ongoing humorous skit, for example, a detective was investigating the murder of one of the cast members. Although the skit's inclusion was initially surprising to many in the audience, several audience members said they thoroughly enjoyed as a counterpoint to the other more "serious" acts.

Vasan says the new format still produced a show just as long as previous years--three hours on some nights, although closer to four Saturday night--but that did not seem as long for the audience.

"We had this hypothesis that if we changed the show [by eliminating narration], it would change the feel of the show for the audience," Vasan says. "This year we wanted the audience to be engaged, with no lull in the action."

Tambar says he thinks this year's show put past productions to shame.

"The show was amazing, the best I've ever seen of Ghungroo," he says. "The tech was better, things ran more smoothly and the set was the most beautiful of any cultural show."

And ticket sales went a long way to prove Tambar's words.

All 340 seats in the Agassiz Theatre were full all four nights of the production, and most had sold out ahead of time.

According to Tambar, this is the first year in the show's history that tickets sold out prior to curtain each night.

And from the exuberant reaction of many audience members, it looks as though next year's show may be sold out in advance as well.

Tomohiro Hamakawa '02 caught the Friday night show and says he will be in the audience again for the 11th Ghungroo production.

"I thought the traditional dances were really good and the skits were unexpected but pretty funny," he explains. "It was really great how there was synthesis of lots of cultures."

Celebrating: South Asian Style

An eclectic mix of song, dance, poetry and humor, the show presented a broad range of entertainment styles from a variety of regions of South Asia.

On any given night, Vasan estimates that about 65 to 70 percent of the acts were performed while all of the acts were included in the closing performance. Each show began with a traditional dance solo, performed by a different dancer each time.

At the beginning of Saturday's matinee, for example, Sharada Modur, a student at the Graduate School of Arts and Sciences, performed "Shiva Anjali and Alarripu," an invocation dance.

Shanthi K. Naidu '02, who says she has been dancing the South Indian Bharata Natyam for 15years, opened the show Friday.

Naidu was also featured in another act, titled "'Jugalbandhi'--A Competition." In this act, she and Ambika Patni '02 highlighted the differences between the Bharata Natyam and Odissi styles of traditional dance.

"We wanted it to be education and entertaining," Naidu says, "because with such a diverse audience, you're never sure what people are going to get."

Ghungroo also featured several group dances often involving upwards of 14 people.

The "Bee'ar Naach" depicted the circumstances of a rural wedding in Bangladesh, illustrating preparation at the bride's home, quarreling between the families of the bride and groom, and the wedding itself.

Traditional elements were mixed with other modern acts like "Yeh Ladka Hai Deewana." This group dance, which involved 16 performers, was described by show organizers as depicting "the relationship between girls and guys...through playful dancing, over-acting and quirky Westernization of culture that is a trademark of Hindi films today."

And in a version of "Bhangra," a folk dance originally from the state of Punjab in Northern India, the choreographers and dancers integrated traditional and modern moves.

In addition to dance performances, cast members presented several songs, some solo and others in large groups.

Neha Mahajan '02 sang a vocal solo called "Chatur Bhuja Joolata Shama Hindore," a semi-classical song in the Hindustani tradition. And 13 cast members performed "Jaago Mohan Preetam," a group song with keyboard, guitar and drum.

Interspersed between other acts, cast members came out in front of the curtain to read poems in many of the languages spoken in South Asia, including Tamil, Punjabi, Urdu, Telegu, Bengali, Sanskrit, Gujarati, Malayalam, Sinhalese and English.

A Worthy Effort

But all good things come with time, something the 110 people involved in the show have sacrificed a good deal of.

Set designers, choreographers, directors and others involved with the production of the show began planning well before winter break, organizers say.

Naidu says rehearsals for Ghungroo cast members began immediately after intersession.

A week before the show, she says, rehearsal hours increased and performers practiced into the wee hours of the morning, some nights not leaving Radcliffe Yard until 2 a.m.

Naidu says one of the things that made participating in Ghungroo a great experience for her is the dedication of everyone involved.

"What makes it so exciting is that people are willing to put in that amount of time, that they take extraordinary measures to make it to practice," she says.

"Something I hear from a lot of people is that at Harvard, you expect people to be working all the time," she adds. "But this show was just really impressive and very professional."

Ahmed says she thinks the show reflected the devotion of its participants not only in terms of time but also in respect for culture.

"It's good for parents to see their kids doing this kind of thing," she says. "It's extremely difficult to be brought up in this culture and maintain some of that tradition, and everyone here is busy with studies, and the fact that students have been able to uphold this is incredible."

Ahmed says that, for her, the sudden calm after weeks and weeks of preparation has left her a little unsettled.

"I think all of us are going through withdrawal," she says. "It's so weird waking up and not having to go to all these rehearsals."

Most cast members agreed to participate in the show without any classical training in either dance or singing; instead, they came in with a willingness to learn.

Those with backgrounds in dance or song taught the others, and learning the various styles of performance was an enormous task, show organizers say.

"Some freshmen may not have ever done classical dances before," Vasan says, "and some of the dances are regional, so one group of South Asians would have done that, but we wanted to include everyone."

"We really had to teach each other," Naidu adds. "I was so surprised to see that there's so much talent here at Harvard, from lights to sounds to actual dancing. I was really impressed with everyone in the cast."

By opening night, members of the cast and crew alike had learned about many different styles of performance. All that was left was to give the audience the kind of spirited experience the show's participants say they had.

"Above everything, I hope the audience got a sense of what South Asia is like," Naidu says. "It's such a diverse culture, and to see all the parts--from the traditional, to the modern, to the Fusion dance, which combined salsa and classical and pop and freestyle--was incredible."