Search For My Tongue Daksha Sheth Dance Company City Hall February 20 The difficulties faced by Asian youth raised in the West and caught between two cultures: this dance from contemporary Indian choreographer Daksha Sheth could have and should have been disturbing and uncompromising.
Instead it had a soft underbelly to it that missed the opportunity to be something sophisticated Asian teenagers would find exciting.
It was based on a poem by Sujata Bhatt - a Gujarati poet living in Germany.
'You ask me what I mean by saying I have lost my tongue. I ask you: what would you do if you had two tongues in your mouth, and lost the first one, the mother tongue, and could not really know the other, the foreign tongue . . .' The poem encapsulates the problems of the search for cultural identity in a multicultural modern world, yet Sheth set her story in leafy woodland, where urban youth would find little to identify with.
She was also, programme notes said, using this as a metaphor for her search for a new dance language. But this mixing of Indian dance traditions - with their rigorous training and rhythmic intensity - with looser contemporary dance made a strange hybrid.
The five dancers were fluid and evidently talented. But the choreography too rarely allowed them that build-up of energy that is so intrinsic to Indian dance.
