Celebrated Kathak dancers Aditi Mangaldas and Aakash Odedra speak to Sunday mid-day about their award-winning duet Mehek, which enthralled Mumbai last week
Mangaldas believes that a duet needs an osmotic process where one is absorbing from the other and also giving to the other. It needs time to grow and blossom. The dancers started work on Mehek in 2021, and premiered it in 2024. Pic/Vipul Sangoi
Mehek revealed to me that when I’m in love, I’m crazily in love. And when I’m in love, I’m in love both offstage and on stage,” dancer and choreographer Aakash Odedra told us a few days before Mehek, an award-winning 70-minute Kathak duet performed by the Leicester-based Odedra alongside renowned Kathak exponent Aditi Mangaldas, premiered at the Nita Mukesh Ambani Cultural Centre’s Grand Theatre. Mehek, which won the 2024 UK Theatre Award for Achievement in Dance, explores the relationship between an older woman and a younger man, and has been recognised for its blending of classical and contemporary elements. Overcome with admiration for the Kathak doyenne, Odedra — who has performed on some of the world’s most prestigious stages, including the Royal Albert Hall and Lincoln Center speaks of how the process of creating Mehek together showed him the softer, more vulnerable sides to a dancer as formidable as Mangaldas. “There are no limits for her in terms of what she’s willing to challenge herself with. Whether she’s familiar with what she’s being asked to do or unfamiliar, she will give everything a go. And that’s what makes her so special.”
Mangaldas is equally effusive in her praise of her dancing partner. “Aakash’s dance is something that stops time, because it’s so fluid,” she notes. “He’s like a sponge that absorbs from different genres, dance styles, music, texts and emotional aspects. He’s a great artist and [his artistry is] reflected in his being.” For Mangaldas, dancing, unbelievably, the first ever duet of her illustrious 50-year career, one of the primary draws of Mehek lay in the possibility of collaboration with a fellow dancer. In the last two decades, there have been many artistic collaborators, she tells us, who have come into her work and whose opinions she has valued greatly, but they have not been dancers. “It’s been in the terms of design, lights, dramaturgy and space. This was the first time that it was a collaboration between two dancers and I found such pleasure in exchanging dance views. [Aakash and I] don’t come from the same background, definitely not the same generation, or the same gender, or the same thought processes. I have much to look back to, he has much to look forward to. And yet there was such a lot that I learned from this collaboration of a duet. For a duet to have resonance, you need to have a kind of coming together which is like an osmotic process where that person becomes a part of you and vice versa.” The pair’s deeply complementary attitudes to their practices and this shared work seep into the conversation. “I say always that when I dance, I die a little. I leave a part of myself on stage,” Odedra tells us, alluding to a spontaneous physical and emotional force which is brought to the stage, and which, he believes, cannot be recreated. For Mangaldas, the experience is both contrary and reflective of the life-affirming nature of art itself: “If I am to look at my dance at this stage of my life, I would say that every time I dance, I live a little on stage.”
Pic/John Valente
In July of 2025, Mangaldas and her ensemble performed Uncharted Seas at the NMACC, an older piece which was premiered in 2006, and which she has performed widely over the past 20 years. What sets Mehek apart, she says, is its truly international nature, showcasing the work of Greek set designer Tina Tzoka, Italian lighting designer Fabiana Piccioli, and with an original score by London-born Nicki Wells, complemented by compositions from Ashish Gangani, Faraz Ahmed and Hiren Chate.
The piece has been performed before other audiences but the Indian premiere brings up specific thoughts for the dancers. “Physically, it is an incredible challenge to be able to stand with [Aditi] and also uphold the space of two individuals to create not only one love story, but a multitude of love stories that people from their own experiences can relate to,” shares Odedra. “And I think to come back to an Indian audience and present an Indian origin dance which has been shaped and reshaped by many different minds and ways of thinking is going to be interesting.”
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