http://www.nytimes.com/2016/09/18/arts/dance/dance-this-fall-indian-mythology-and-ballets-by-women.html 2016-09-15 22:58:40 Dance This Fall: Indian Mythology and Ballets by Women Kathakali brings a dash of color to the White Light Festival in “Sounds of India,” and New York ballet companies present works by women. === The Indian dance-theater genre Kathakali is exceptionally vivid, its characters often demonstrating a cartoonlike vitality. It’s on the cusp of theater and dance; in some performances, its core essence is music. The brightly colored and ornamented makeup is celebrated (some characters have green faces, some red): It’s like a crust, usually taking performers more than two hours to apply or have applied. The bright and complex costumes, with some characters in apparel like Elizabethan farthingales, are equally picturesque. Stories from Indian mythology are told, often from those central bodies of legend, the Ramayana and Mahabharata. Pictures from Kathakali often serve as cover imagery for guidebooks for India and become poster symbols for all that is most theatrically exotic. [ More this fall: Ever since I saw The two Kathakali events I witnessed in Kerala were given by different companies in different cities. Above all, they revealed how diverse the genre could be. With one, epic style — stage behavior was often tender, intimate — was established primarily by musical meter, as grand, propulsive and firm as the hexameters of Homer. With the other, physicality and sound were explosive, loud, funny, excitingly grotesque. Though there was a raised stage, at least one character in each show made a memorable entrance through the audience. October also brings American Ballet Theater’s fall season. This one, lasting two weeks at the David H. Koch Theater ( For me, however, its most signal events are two revivals. Alexei Ratmansky’s “ A wave of female choreographers is coming to ballet. New York City Ballet opens (on Sept. 20) with This could prove mere tokenism. Will any of these choreographers turn out to be the goods? I agree with the choreographer Bronislava Nijinska, among the most original of all choreographers, refreshed ballet by challenging many of its conventions: She showed the pathos of marriage in “Les Noces,” the sexual ambiguities of smart society in “Les Biches.” May one or more of the 2016-17 female choreographers help make ballet’s world larger than it is.