Mehek – Aakash Odedra & Aditi Mangaldas Review ★★★★★

It’s not very often that you see a show where all elements – performance, set design, lighting, sound score, staging – come together so perfectly that they create an entrancing experience, both visually and emotionally. Mehek is such a show.

Created by the foremost exponents of the South Asian Kathak dance form, Leicester-based Aakash Odedra and New Delhi-based Aditi Mangaldas, Mehek, a word that derives from the Hindi for fragrance, tells of a taboo love affair between an older woman and a younger man.

It’s a work of intense beauty, both in Odedra and Mangaldas’s mesmerising central performances, and in the atmosphere generated by Fabiana Piccioli’s crepuscular lighting design, and the sound score, featuring Nicki Wells’s haunting vocals, music at times dreamy and ethereal, at times ominous and forbidding.

Tina Tzoka’s set design, based on triangular shards of mirrored glass, some hanging above the stage like a giant mobile, others haphazardly gathered at the back to create a raised part-hidden platform for the musicians, adds an element of symbolism, playing with ideas of reflection, surface and depth.

Karthika Naïr’s dramaturgy is impressionistic rather than linear, but the story of this impassioned doomed affair comes across clearly. Kathak dancing, with its whirlwind turns, rhythmic foot stomping and eloquent arms graphically translates the dizzying emotions of love and desire: from the excitement of love at first sight, through attempts by each of the dancers to escape their fateful attraction to their final coming together in a scene of deep beauty and delicacy.

Both dancers are compelling. Lean and elegant, the handsome, neatly bearded Odedra brings the vitality of youth to his performance, devouring the stage in movements that sometimes looked like weightless gliding.

Mangaldas is equally entrancing, her agility and technical ability undiminished by age, her presence tremendously sensual. The chemistry between these two dancers is exceptional – you wouldn’t have guessed this was the first time they danced together.

Their affair is broken by society, symbolised by three drummers, who walk onto the stage and get between them, their rhythmic drum beats harsh and unforgiving, forcing them apart.

When the lovers reunite for the finale they do so under a soft shower of dust, symbolising perhaps the persistence of memory through the mists of time.

It is a deeply moving ending to a show that throughout engaged all your emotions. For once, Sadler’s Wells now apparently compulsory standing ovation was well and truly deserved.