Lamps on Lilypads

A message of love and peace in creative Hindustani dancing

by Heidi M. Pascual

dance for God on your kitchen floor
no stage is too small to raise your voice
callous your feet and soften your heart
in the moment of each turn
open your soul to the flow of love
into your body
and out to the world
the only stage worth performing in
-jaysi

Mix traditional and contemporary music, blend with two different spiritual beliefs, and spice the whole with poetry. The result is an exquisitely beautiful performance whose message transcends the ordinary, reflects a dream for peace and prosperity, and expresses hope in humanity’s goodness, love for others, and beauty of the inner soul.

Jaysi, dressed in a colorful blue-green sari, starts with Pranam, an invocational prayer consisting of her own poetry. She greets her audience with a Namaskar, which she describes as a greeting to “honor the place in you where when you are at that place in you and I am at that place in me, we are one.” Like a “peacock in a palace garden,” Jaysi teaches her audience how she follows the cycle of 16 beats known as teental in a theka (rhythmic cycle) and shows the basic footwork of kathak, a classical dance form from Northern India with Hindu and Muslim influences.

Jaysi’s graceful body and arm movements, powerful footwork, and varied facial expressions keep her audience’s attention as they try to understand why teental is considered “the mother of all cycles.” Soon the audience learns that it is the first cycle taught to students of Hindustani music and dance.

From dance to dance, Jaysi acts a story or recites a composition, either hers or someone else’s. She combines these literary compositions with her dance numbers in a very rhythmic way. Her many years of training in kathak dancing with Pandit Chitresh Das and in tabla drumming with Pandit Swapan Chaudhuri, along with her early childhood lessons in ballet, tap, and jazz, surely have provided Jaysi a strong foundation for musical excellence. But the rest is naturally her own.

Her third act, titled “Love,” is a traditional Mexican mariachi song, “La Paloma,” which surprises her audience to no end: here’s an Indian American in her traditional dress (this time in pink and green) singing and acting out a Spanish song of love and of hope for someone’s return.

When the hearts of an audience are captured by a performance not ordinarily seen, the memory of that performance lingers for a long time. “Lamps on Lilypads” is such a performance, there’s nothing like it. Jaysi brings to life a dance form that in some ways describes who she is and where she is coming from.

Jaysi’s fellow artists, who provide music through tabla, violin, guitar, and sarode — Wallace Harvey, Ben Kunin, and Tim Witter — share her love for Hindustani music and many other things Indian. The common denominator among them, apparently, is the Ali Akbar College of Music in California.

The group’s October performances in Wisconsin (at the Overture Center and at the Madison Cultural Center for the Arts) were Jaysi’s way of paying tribute to her hometown, Plover, Wisc., which she describes as “the town with love in its heart,” and to her alma mater, the University of Wisconsin-Madison Medical School, from which she graduated in 1990. While her creative passions are dancing and poetry, Jaysi’s other life is the medical profession. She cares for patients part-time at the Tom Waddell Clinic for the Homeless in San Francisco, is an attending physician in its urgent care unit, and is also an assistant clinical professor at the University of California in San Francisco.

Jaysi herself is her message to mankind. Love and peace are her dance’s messages and her performance off the stage makes her message real.

Source: Madison Times