Asia Dance Channel

Maya Ravan

29 August 2009
Kuala Lumpur Convention Center

By Rathimalar Govindarajoo

Award-winning actress and Bharatanatyam exponent Shobana Chandarkumar, still beautiful at age 43, staged her musical dance drama Maya Ravan for Malaysian audiences in Kuala Lumpur Convention Center last August.

Maya Ravan is a musical, or rather a dance drama interpretation, of the ancient epic Ramayana, written, choreographed and directed by Shobana.

Shobana herself plays Ravan, the demon lord, and performers from Kalarpana, the dance school owned by Shobhana, formed a team of almost 20 female dancers playing other roles. The proceeds of the show in Malaysia are donated to the Malaysian Association for the Blind.

The musical score of Maya Ravan is made up of a fusion of popular Indian film music in Tamil, Hindi and Karnada. The narration is in English, pre-recorded by well-known Indian film artistes including Naseeruddin Shah, Jackie Shroff, Milind Soman, Suhasini Mani Ratnam, Revathy, Rohini, Tabu, Sameer Sony and Mohanlal. In addition to the narration, to make sure the audience understands the plot, the dancers impersonate their characters using simplified forms of the facial expressions, hand gestures and body language of Indian classical dance forms.

Maya Ravan has all the ingredients of a typical Indian commercial box office hit. It was like watching an Indian movie on stage, with its dramatic storyline, emotion-packed dialogue, voice-overs by eminent actors, exaggerated acting, catchy tunes, glittering costumes and projections that helped audience identify the plot of each scene. More than two-hours long, the dance drama told an interesting version of the Ramayana inspired by novelist Ashok Banker, which emphasizes the roles of the darker powers – Ravan the demon lord, Kaikeyi the jealous stepmother, and the female demon Soorpanaka. By taking on these roles, Shobana tries to convey a new point of view of the Ramayana, in which Evil has more to say than Good!

What is an Indian film without comical scenes, in addition to dance numbers? Thus, Shobana included in Maya Ravan many comic moments as well as catchy pleasant dances. The Soorpanaka scene, where Shobana plays the Demoness role to win the hero Rama’s love, had the audience laughing out loud. No one would have imagined the beautiful Shobana taking up roles of such ugliness and evil! But Shobana played up the comic dialogue and exaggerated facial expressions effortlessly. And as Shobana is known to set the stage on fire with her prodigious acting talent alone, not forgetting her high reputation in the Indian film industry, she brought with her a diva aura replete with extravagant make-up, costumes and larger-than-life acting.

It was enjoyable to watch the performances of Shobana’s younger students, especially the ones who played the main roles of Rama, Sita and Hanuman. The supporting cast consisted of Bhavani, Archana, Gayatri, Chitra Nair, Shylaja, Anita, Suma Mani, Aiswarya, Anuroopitha and Seetha. A number of little children took on the smaller roles and danced a rock ’n’ roll Oldies number in the monkey scene, which was fun to watch. It had a slight touch of contemporary dance to it, using rolls, lifts and floor patterns to create the theme of monkeys dancing and playing.

Although Maya Ravan tries hard, on the whole it fails to reach the standard of quality of other great Indian musical theatre works such as Bombay Dreams and Merchants of Bollywood. The lighting design, in particular, was lacking and old-fashion – flickering lights for chaos, red for fire, blue for cooler moments. These effects have been done to death, and they make the scenes appear clichéd. And while it was a brilliant idea not to use props, instead using projected video to create the ambience of each scene, I was disappointed that the projection only showed immobile forests and castles to create literal backdrops. The only motion that occurred on the projector was running text that was also read by the narrator. Lighting for theatre has evolved and it is a pity Shobana has not used recent developments in lighting design to their full advantage.

The opening scene was interesting – like a movie, it introduced the names of cast and crew, which was useful as program notes were not provided, and then provided a prologue of the Ramayana accompanied by exciting music. But as the lights came up, I could not help but notice a big black square patch of carpet on the brown wooden stage. Perhaps it was used as a safety precaution to prevent dancers from slipping, but it was distracting and it looked messy.

And while the dancing and acting in general were good, Maya Ravan used the old technique of performers mimicking pre-recorded voices, making some scenes feel like a school concert. It also lacked the distinction of professionalism in musical theatre which should include real-time acting, dancing and singing.

Overall, more could have been done to enhance the quality of Maya Ravan. But while it may seem substandard for a fully-fledged musical, it was a good effort nevertheless. And the production as a whole was a useful medium to reach out to theatre newcomers to introduce them to theatre and also culture.