Shriram Bharatiya Kala Kendra present Malaysia’s Ramli Ibrahim’s ‘Ganjam’, in association with Sutra Foundation

Shriram Bharatiya Kala Kendra present

Malaysia’s Ramli Ibrahim’s ‘Ganjam’, in association with Sutra Foundation

at Kamani Auditorium, New Delhi

at 7pm on Wednesday, April 13th, 2016

“We dance for laughter, we dance for tears, we dance for madness, we dance for fears, we dance for hopes, we dance for screams, we are the dancers, we create the dreams.”

–       Angela Monet

The magic of Malaysian dancer Ramli Ibrahim’s, choreography and excellence, dancer and expertise as costume designer lent wings to the soul of the dancers and encouraged laughter, tears, fears et al to gay abandon‎, translating the Odissi dance form into an intoxicating celebration with his troupe of ten artists, carrying the traditional form into a contemporary crescendo. Shriram Bharatiya Kala Kendra presented Ramli Ibrahim’s ‘Ganjam’, in association with Sutra Foundation. Ramli Ibrahim is the dynamic force in Malaysian theatre and possesses open-mindedness for both the old and the new. Trained in classical ballet, modern dance and Indian classical dance, Ramli is a creator and a visionary in the arts, who sees unity within the diversity of all of Sutra’s artistic endeavors. In Malaysia, Ramli is acclaimed as a pioneer dancer and choreographer of international standing in the fields of dance he has mastered Bharatanatyam, Odissi as well as Contemporary Dance.

As a teacher of Bharatanatyam and Odissi, Ramli has groomed some of the finest dancers, who have emerged from Malaysia and at the same time placed Indian classical dance in the context of the Malaysian experience. Ramli studied Bharatanatyam under Adyar K Lakshman and Odissi under the late Guru Deba Prasad Das. As Artistic Director of Sutra Dance Theatre, which he started in 1983, Ramli Ibrahim has always envisioned his creativity as a holistic universal experience, one that transcends all cultural boundaries. He has created more than 40 original dance repertoires, in the traditional and contemporary idioms. For Ramli, theatre is the all-encompassing universal vehicle for his creative vision, it expresses life itself in the richness of all its myths and rituals.

As a 3-year-old, Ramli enjoyed dancing in the fields. Instead of walking, dancing was innate to him and there was an inherent ‘entertainer’ in him. Even though by profession Ramli Ibrahim was a qualified mechanical engineer, he pursued dance along with his academic activities. He learnt Malay folk dances and ballet having performed with the Sydney Dance Company in Australia, New York, London and Europe. Ramli learnt Bharatanatyam from Adyar K Lakshman and performed Indian classical dance under the name of Ramachandra! But when he was exposed to the Odissi dance form, he was enthralled and development as a reaction against the overly structured, steeped in tradition Bharatanatyam, that prompted Ramli to go to Puri and seek institution from a disciple of Guru Deba Prasad Das and soon become after a direct student of Guru Deba Prasad Das.
The idols and guiding forces during the early stages of Ramli’s career were Picasso, Japanese poetry, books on myths and mysticism, works of Carl Gustav Jung and more such.
The intense guru-shishya relationship that Gajendra Kumar Panda had with Guru Deba Prasad Das inspired him to write ‘Adorations’ which culminated in many performances. Deba Prasad was a very intense person. His passionate character later made him on very controversial and difficult to get along with. He was the youngest of the 3 gurus to revive Odissi. Though he was very traditional, he was part of the Jayantika, which was the revivalist group. But he pulled out of it later, as he disagreed with some of the new innovations that were made by the Jayantika. Deba Prasad used to do all kinds of stuff. He believed that in classical, the folk and tribal must also come out or else the classical work will be like white sugar…looking good but with no value.
Says Ramli Ibrahim, “Choreography is and always will be my main focus. In the many beautiful Odissi dance forced, I find scope to exercise my own choreographic interpretations unlike the structured Bharatanatyam items. All my Odissi productions are commissioned works. My contemporary choreography is influenced for instance by the performing art genres like Makyong and Menora, Malay martial art form of Silat, besides Indian classical dance idioms. I am involved in a lot of networking and cross-genre work as I travel a lot and meet many artistes from different countries and cultural background. The dance items that pertain to Sakuhachi reflect the meditative quality of music. In ‘Mukaiji Reibo’, a zen monk is on a punt adrift on a misty sea. He hears the mellow tones of a flute, played by Sakuhachi flutist Christopher Blasdel, and is drawn towards it. The story is of Japanese Buddhist origin but I take the point of embarkation from the divine flute player, which is Krishna himself.”

Ramli reflects, “To create innovative productions one has to make new rules or break them in order to do something new, you have to know your art form. The balance happens then. In contemporary work, you are the sum total of your experience. If you want to express something, what comes out then, modern, classical or folk have to come out. Then you have achieved the challenge of choreography. Or else the audience will see through it. In this, you have to trust the intelligence of the rasikas and critics. The choreographer does what he is supposed to do. He creates the work. He does not categorise it. He just goes ahead and creates and lets the critics categorise it. But a critic has to be compassionate. An artiste’s graph will not go up all the way all the time. That’s when I realise, that critics and audience are cruel to performers sometimes.”

Financially, my company Sutra has been totally unsupported since the beginning. It has taken years of hard work to bring Sutra to its current status. Now, no one can ignore us, as we have achieved recognition in Malaysia and abroad “Sutra Dance Theatre”, Kuala Lumpur.

Indeed, Ramli Ibrahim believes in the core truth enunciated by Agnes de Mille’s sentiment, “The truest expression of a people is in its dance and in its music. Bodies never lie.”