Aakash Odedra conjures startling visual magic at PuSh fest opener

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      Presented by the PuSh International Performing Arts Festival and the Dance Centre. At the Vancouver Playhouse on Tuesday, January 19. Continues on January 20

      Viewers left the opening night of the PuSh International Performing Arts Festival with a stunning image—a fitting one for the launch of the creatively mindblowing interdisciplinary bash that takes over the city for the next several weeks.

      Aakash Odedra's Murmur, the second piece in a double bill with Inked, wraps up with an extended image of the dancer spinning, caught in a mad tornado of paper blown upward by a circle of fans. Adding to the effect are the projections of a swooping, diving flock of birds that catch the flying sheets.

      It's exhilarating and hugely metaphorical. Throughout the piece, Odedra expresses what it's like to have dyslexia, but the work crescendoes into a vision of unlocking creative potential as Odedra finds a kind of freedom in the shifting landscape of letters and numbers that the condition causes.

      Britain's Odedra stands out for the way he successfully mixes the rhythm and movement of classical South Asian dance with edgy electronic music, digital imagery, and conceptual ideas. And both works are marked by striking visual moments.

      Inked, which is inspired by his Rajput grandmother's tattoos and ideas about identity, begins with a clever trompe-l'oiel where what looks like a figure silhouetted at the back of the stage—the "ghost" of his grandmother, perhaps?—actually becomes the doorway through which Odedra enters the piece.

      Later, he doubles over to reveal two eyes painted in black on his shoulder blades, and the impeccably honed dancer proceeds to squeeze and manipulate his sculpted muscles so that his torso becomes a strangely grimacing or quizzical face.

      You'll appreciate this opening piece most if you can let go and submit to its trancelike state: the whole piece, choreographed with Damien Jalet, feels like an intense prayer, culminating in Odedra covered in black ink, and painting huge figure eights—the circles of life—on the floor.

      Aakash Odedra in Murmur
      Sean Goldthorpe photo

      Odedra's work is full of visual trickery, but the man is insanely watchable on his own, drawing from the lightning-fast footwork and gesticulating arms and fingers of kathak and bharata natyam dance forms.

      Yes, Odedra packs a lot of farflung ideas and experiments into these works, and there are sequences that are much slower and meditative. But the man sure knows how to build to a climax.

      And Murmur's final flurry of sound, light, and whirling movement prompted gasps and a standing O on opening night.

      He's only on for one more night, this evening. Grab a seat in a higher row because the full effect of his high- and low-tech visual magic comes from seeing them from above, though perhaps the loss will be missing every minute muscular manipulation of his lean frame.

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