Amrita Lahiri Presentation "Samudra- Mother Ocean" - At Serendipity Arts Festival - New Delhi - April 2017

"Samudra- Mother Ocean"

Amrita Lahiri 
Serendipity Arts Festival
April 6th, 2017

Amrita presents Samudra at the Serendipity Arts Festival. Here is a note about the production.

Within each of us is an ocean pregnant with possibilities for creation. Tagore in his poem ‘Samudrer Proti’ addresses the Ocean as the eternal mother of the earth. She is not the stereotyped mother brimming with tenderness and self-sacrifice, put on a pedestal. Rather, she is naïve, impulsive, powerful, animal-like, fallible, contradictory- an everyday mother.

According to the Book of Genesis, on the third day, God commanded the waters to recede, and make dry land appear. That is the most well known of the stories of the creation. It is matched by legends from several other ancient cultures that speak of the emergence of the universe from an infinite expanse of waters. Tagore in this poem imagines a primordial sea in the process of giving birth to the world, tied to it by an infinitely deep love and longing, almost like a mother’s ties to its child, sometimes fierce and raging resulting in tsunamis, sometimes a gentle lullaby rhythm.

Samudrer Proti gives beautiful imagery for choreography and music, even when we have not used the lines literally. The music is composed by Sudha Raghuraman.

‘Hey Adi Janani Sindhu…’
O Eternal Mother Ocean…
I am earth’s child, sitting on your bank,
Listening to your sound.

I’m thinking, one can understand some of your secrets
Like a relative understands a mute person’s sign language.
It seems, in the midst of my heart, the blood that flows in the veins
Knows the same language, and has not learnt anything else.

It seems, as though I remember, when I was one with
The unborn embryo that was this world in that huge womb of yours
For millions of years your restless musical note
Inside me has gotten imprinted.

That pre-birth memory, on the earth, which is in your womb
That eternal life-pulse of your maternal heart- very slight, muted-
Like a hint, rises throughout my body,
-a few select verses from translated from Tagore’s Bengali poem ‘Samudrer Proti’



Dance Choreography: Amrita Lahiri
Music Composition: Sudha Raghuraman
Percussion: Shambhu Bhattacharjee
Flute: Raghuraman
Mridangam: Chandrasekhar
Nattuvangam: Kesavan

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