The Last Performance: A Homage in Six Seasons
The open-air theatre glows beneath a half-moon, the air trembling with jasmine and damp earth. Around the stage, trees stand like silent spectators; the night itself seems poised to listen. This is Ratan Thiyam’s final homage — to the great guru, to Kalidasa, and to the eternal dance between the elements and the soul.
A flute rises — a single, quivering note. “Meghānām āgamena…” When the clouds arrive, the earth adorns herself anew. Thus begins Ritu Samhara.
From the first beat, nature and theatre merge. Wind moves through the trees in rhythm with the drums; fireflies flicker like floating lamps. The audience is drawn into an orbit of creation, each heart echoing a private season of its own becoming.
When the rains arrive — veils swirling like mist, anklets clashing like thunder — a man in the third row leans forward. The rhythm of water awakens something tender. He remembers a monsoon years ago, a loss that washed him clean, love that drenched him too deeply to hold. The dancers do not portray sorrow; they become its fragrance, carrying karuṇa rasa — compassion that softens the edges of grief. For him, the rain on stage and the rain within are one.
The tempo shifts. Autumn descends like a sigh — ochre silks rustle, the air fragrant with harvest. A woman watches, hands folded in her lap. Her mind drifts home, to the clink of tumblers and the sharp scent of ginger in boiling tea. Every rain calls for pakoras and stories, every summer for iced tea and shade. Festivals bloom through her thoughts — Diwali’s lamps, Sankranti’s bright kites, Holi’s laughter welcoming spring. The seasons choreograph her life: recipes, laundry, moods. In that everyday rhythm, she feels śṛṅgāra rasa — the fullness of love, domestic and divine — the sacred gleam hiding in the mundane.
Winter follows — dancers draped in white, their gestures deliberate and still. At the back, an HR professional watches the calm and feels his own life mirrored. Winter, for him, is introspection: decluttering, redefining, drawing inward. He senses śānta rasa — peace born not of silence but of surrender to rhythm. He thinks of Diwali’s glow against the long night, of Sankranti’s kites slicing the wind — humanity’s ancient instinct to make joy out of endurance.
Then spring bursts forth. Drums quicken, colors spiral like laughter. “Kusumāny ujjvalāni…” — the flowers blaze with life. The audience inhales together; renewal courses through them as ānanda rasa — bliss that is both human and cosmic.
As the final tableau forms — all six seasons converging — Thiyam’s dancers move in a slow spiral, each step a prayer, each gesture a dissolving boundary between body and element. The flute fades into the night wind. For a heartbeat, performance and world are indistinguishable: crickets join the chorus, the breeze becomes percussion, stars blink like stage lights.
The applause rises softly, reverent as leaves after rain. The open-air theatre glimmers with scattered petals and fading smoke, as though the earth itself exhales after remembering something ancient.
Thiyam’s Ritu Samhara is not merely art; it is a lament and a mirror. His choreography reminds us that in mastering nature, we have drifted from her pulse. The forests no longer whisper to our sleep; the rains come, but we hear them only through glass. We have traded the scent of soil for the hum of machines, the rhythm of seasons for the ticking of clocks.
And somewhere in that quiet estrangement, we have lost our inner monsoon, our spring of renewal. In chasing the perfect self, we have stepped away from life itself — mistaking refinement for awakening, forgetting that soul energy thrives only in communion.
The dancers bow one last time — silhouettes against the deep blue night. Around them, the wind stirs, the stars shimmer, and the trees sway in applause older than language. For a fleeting moment, art and earth, body and spirit, rejoin — the divine revealed in the mud, the laughter, the rain.
As the music fades into the hum of the living world, an invocation rises — ancient, pure, complete:
Angikam bhuvanam yasya, vachikam sarva vangmayam,
Aharyam chandra-tārādi-tam, numah sāttvikam śivam.
A bow to the One whose body is the universe, whose speech is all language, whose ornaments are the moon and stars — to that pure and gentle Shiva, we offer our reverence.
(For Blogchatter’s theme “Seasonal Transitions,” this piece reflects how outer seasons, human emotion, agrarian rhythm, and spiritual awareness intertwine — and how art becomes the bridge back to our forgotten harmony with life.)
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