Natarani’s six-day theatre festival, Six and The City, ended with a lively performance of the play Love & Lavani on Sunday. Though all the songs in the 130-minute play are Marathi, the sentiment behind them are not hard to understand and the Ahmedabadi audience was thoroughly engaged by the performance. Egged on by the performers, they whistled, hooted, clapped and even danced on-stage, in the true spirit of Lavani, a folk-dance form from Maharashtra.
The production retains the raunchy element that is the hallmark of Lavani, as it tells the story of Shabanabai Ashturkar, a dancer from Kolhapur, who later made her home in Pune. The Natarani show marks the first performance of Love & Lavani outside of Maharashtra. “It was really encouraging to get such a great response from the audience,” says director Bhushan Koregaonkar. “Now we are hopeful of bringing more plays from our repertoire to Ahmedabad in the future.”
In its heyday in the 18th Century, Lavani was a dance form patronised by the Maratha kings and it was often performed to bolster the spirits of tired soldiers in the field. Over the years, the dance has been gentrified as folk-art and is now studied and taught in Universities across Maharashtra.
The musicians and actors in Love & Lavani are all borrowed from professional troupes. Much of the charm of Lavani lies in the dancer’s ability to engage with the audience and they pulled this off quite well in Ahmedabad, as they flirted with the men in the front rows (and in one case a bespectacled young man in the last row). Clad in heavy jewellery and the traditional nine-yard sari, they delighted the crowd with their singing and come-hither looks. The climax of the play is a lively Quali.
The “love” story in Love & Lavani is not one you might expect. Shabanabai is seduced by a rich Mumbai builder named Mohan to leave her dance troupe and become his mistress, but he eventually tires of her and she returns to her Lavani career at the age of 40. She later becomes the mistress of another wealthy businessman, who, like Mohan, is a married man with kids, but this time around, she does not leave her troupe. The love in Love & Lavani is thus about self-love and love of art more than anything else. A message that was well received by the Ahmedabad audience.
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