Mythili Prakash: She's Auspicious review – a paean to girl power
She's Auspicious is a dismantling of the idea of woman being put on a pedestal, bestowed with value through someone else's eyes. Being shaped by an outside view of womanhood – even a supposedly flattering one – is a suffocation of sorts. Prakash is an Indian-American dancer, best known in the UK for performing with Akram Khan, who has mentored her. Her brand of bharatanatyam (the traditional dance form comes from southern India) blends classical technique with a questioning sensibility and the freeform structure of contemporary theatre.
Prakash is an accomplished dancer who, at first at least, doesn't give too much away. A contained presence, her movement is economical, undemonstrative, and not clouded by the strain of visible effort (there's great skill in that, and power over her instrument). She can balance in absolute stillness, rooted to the earth.
As the piece progresses she gradually scrolls through emotional states: anxiety, relief, delight, enforced restraint, with her usually freely expressive hands suddenly clamped stiff over her mouth. She begins as a woman, plainly dressed in black and white, but is elevated to goddess status, reappearing in vivid red, in a kind of shrine made of scaffolding, with a coterie of followers. Seven women in shades of indigo bow and pray and sing and make music for her. She is deified and decorated with jewellery. But for Prakash, that's not the aspiration. You get the sense that this goddess is also a woman, a mother, a person of flaws and conflict (and strength and compassion). When Prakash throws off all expectations, her hair swings loose, her movements become bigger and freer, feet planted wide, mouth agape with something akin to both hunger and glee.
She's Auspicious turns into a paean to girl power, an uprising. Percussionist Aswini Srinivasan especially drives the energy forward with racing rhythms, the women banging sticks against the scaffold, the shrine tumbling. It's a piece about agency; an undoing of the myth.
At Sadler's Wells East, London, until 2 March
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