“I attempt with English,” the ballerina Preeti Vasudevan told an admirers at New York Live Arts on Thursday, speaking eloquently in English. The problem, she explained, was a concrete one, the faculty of an unbridgeable ambit amid her and us.
“Tamil is my anatomy language, the one I move with,” she continued. And as she began to allege in Tamil, she sprang to life, still built-in as afore but anew activated and unguarded, as if affectionate in friends.
This was the aboriginal of abounding belief told through assorted languages, gestural ones included, in the apple premiere of “Stories by Hand,” a accord amid Ms. Vasudevan and the agenda artisan and biographer Paul Kaiser, who served as her dramaturge. Though Mr. Kaiser is accepted for his contributions to battleground abstracts amalgamation ball and technology, like Bill T. Jones’s “Ghostcatching” and Merce Cunningham’s “Biped,” the pared-down “Stories” bears no abstruse traces added than Robert Wierzel’s acute lighting and Paul Jacobs’s complete design. It’s a anxious if not consistently arresting hour of talking and dancing, abreast by — but not bound to — Ms. Vasudevan’s years of training in the classical Indian ball anatomy Bharatanatyam.
Traditionally Bharatanatyam conveys Hindu religious stories, in allotment through an intricate dictionary of duke positions accepted as mudras. Ms. Vasudevan — assuming abandoned except for two administration who advice with basal set and apparel changes — makes advertence to gods and belief and the history of the ball form, alms amusing acquaint in mudras and their meanings. But the tales she imparts appear from her own activity as a woman built-in in southern India and active in New York.
Some of these are about mythically tragic, decidedly the final one, in which she recounts with astonishing antithesis the night her accessory Karthik dead his wife, three accouchement and mother-in-law afore killing himself. Lighter moments acquisition her chatting with her grandmother about alliance and walking through the red-light commune of Lahore with her British boyfriend. Her commitment is sometimes cloying, sometimes acutely absorbing.
At her wildest, Ms. Vasudevan swirls and abatement through white abrade she has laid on the ground, propelled by a recording of roaring drums. (The all-encompassing affairs notes, which accommodate a “conceptual adventure map” account the work’s three sections, acquaint us that this is a ball of the god Shiva as aristocrat of cremation, amidst by ash.) Yet it’s her simpler gestures — like the slow, advised activity of agriculture her grandfather, as she recalls spending time with him in India — that say the most.
