A rip-roaring night of Lavani dance

Artists performing at ‘Mumbai Chi Lavani’, at the ‘Remembering Veenapani Festival – 2023’ held at Adishakti Theatre near Puducherry. | Photo Credit: KUMAR SS

On a rip-roaring night charged with cheeky innuendo and bawdy humour, nautch girls performed the Lavani dance to bring the roof down at Adishakti theatre on the penultimate day of the ninth Remembering Veenapani Festival.

‘Mumbai Chi Lavani’ presented by the Kali Billi troupe was of the ‘Sangeet Bari’ stream of traditional Tamasha, the itinerant theatrical carnival of folk performers in Maharashtra that rose in popularity in the 18th century as a cheap and accessible form of entertainment for the hoi polloi.

Women and cross-dressing male artistes wearing extravagantly colourful saris and bulky ghungroos sang and danced to the reverberating rhythms of the dholki and tabla, supplemented by keyboard soundscapes.

The performance was punctuated by a coy smile here, a mischievous glance there or a fluttering of eyelids in a mock enticement.

Savitri Medhatul, who joked about with the audience to break the ice, set the tone for the evening with the assertion: “Come on, this is a Lavani show.. so unless you give us some response... there is no fun. After all, it is all about flirting”.

The roar that erupted would set the decibel bar for the rest of the night.

Noting that the first encounter with Lavani may have been through film, song sequences or reality shows, the artiste was of the view that “if you want to understand the true Lavani, you have to make the effort”

The artiste, whose passion for the art form took her to the Arya Bhushan Tamasha theatre, Pune, has produced-directed the documentary, ‘Natale Tumchyasathi … Behind the Adorned Veil’ and, in 2015, brought out the popular play ‘Sangeet Bari’, featuring hereditary Lavani artistes.

She walked the audience through the phases of a traditional tamasha performances begin with the invocation to Lord Ganesh (gan), a gawlan (depiction of Krishna and Gopis), misra (salute to the audience), batavani and the vag natya (scripted plays) and rangbaji (the segment where Lavani is performed).

Tamasha troupes in the olden days usually consisted of 100 to 200 people, travelling in buses or trucks to different places to perform to audiences of 2,000 or more, mainly in rural areas. The form later branched out into two types of dance performances — the dancing lavani (featuring a singer and dancer) and the khadi lavani (performer does both).

As she explained, unlike the travelling theatre, the ‘Sangeet Bari’, a form of rooted theatre, like a permanent residency, emerged.

“This theatre where groups of artistes performed in turns every evening worked on a patronage basis”, she said. It also marked a transition from the mass ticketed shows to exclusive performances for an audience of about ten.

She also drew out Lavini’s connection with Mumbai, Bollywood and how to it evolved with the times to stay relevant as a form of entertainment. As mills, whose workers were mainstay patrons of Tamasha-Lavani, declined, especially after the great strike of 1982, combined with a real estate boom that swallowed public performance spaces, the traditional art form began to fade out.

Lavani re-emerged in the avatar of “banner shows” in the early 1990s and continues to enjoy tremendous success — an important change being the entry of performers outside the traditional Lavani community.

The show also featured a Baithakachi Lavani segment where the artiste performed seated, with the emphasis on the singing — a rendition of the classic ‘Dil cheez kya hai’ from Umrao Jaan.

As the show wore on it must have dawned on the audience that Lavani is not just about titillation. The art form also engages in social commentary, gender-inclusive messaging, and the idea of consent.