Presenting the story of rice and tracing the South East Asian connect

A dance production ‘Arisi: Rice’ was staged at the Esplanade Theatre in Singapore last month and clips of the video documentary of the multi-national dance production were shown at a presentation about its making at the CPR Convention Centre

The habit of cultivating and consuming rice binds the people of many countries on this planet.

Apsaras Arts Dance Company chose rice as the base of its latest dance production titled ‘Arisi: Rice’ that was staged at the Esplanade Theatre in Singapore last month.

Portions of the video documentary of the multi-national dance production were shown at a presentation about its making at the CPR Convention Centre on Saturday. Aravinth Kumarasamy, creative head and art director, Apsaras Arts of Singapore, said that Bali and India shared a lot of common things.  

“South East Asia has very beautifully copy-pasted many things from India and out of all these places, Bali is very special, since it has taken and preserved many things, including the culture of rice, the double-knotted Ikkat to even Hinduism. When you go to temples in Bali, they give Akshadhai [rice coloured with turmeric and considered holy],” he said.  

The show, he said talks of three things — how tedious the cultivation is, how it is dependent on nature, how rice is there in every part of our lives.

Its music score was composed by Rajkumar Bharathi, and musicians from the Singapore Chinese Orchestra, Balinese Gamelan and Kecak too came together under the musical direction of Sai Sharavanam, who explained how it was not an easy task to put the different kinds of music together.

Bharathanatyam exponents and gurus Padma Subrahmanyam and Priyadarshini Govind hoped that the production would be performed in India. Ms. Subrahmanyam recalled how in the last 30 years Mr. Kumarasamy, a veena player and a Bharathanatyam dancer, had grown from strength to strength. Ms. Govind said that the production was a landmark production and had all qualities including a social message, its relevance, the sound scale, beautiful colour palettes of costumes and dance composition.