A workshop with Kumudini Lakhia

I was lucky enough to take a kathak intensive workshop with Kumudini Lakhia, the mother of modern kathak dance, this past weekend.

Anamika-Navatman Intermediate Kathak Students + Prashant Shah! (I tried to find the group shot with Kumudini but couldn't)

It was absolutely incredible. Possibly one of the things I continue to feel surprised by - and also, on some level, completely expect - is that in the basics, dance technique across the board is fairly similar. There is no accepted dance where you can compress your spine, or not use your pelvis to create a turnout, or arch your back in a standing position.

What clicked from this particular workshop is that in dance, excess movement is never appreciated. While that may seem obvious in bharatanatyam, where the linear lines and strength convey that, you'd think the opposite with odissi and definitely kathak with its incredible soft (looking!), fluid, supple movements. Kumudini repeatedly emphasized solely moving the wrist from point A to point B with no extra openings, tweaks, etc. Even the hands were just these appendages that followed.  She went so far as to give us a math lesson. "What is the shortest distance between two points? A line! Don't add any thing else in!"

From working with Nrityagram (and following them for years now) and continuing work with kathak, the final word in all of it, regardless of what you are trying to convey to an audience (strength, severity, lightness, fluidity, happiness) you must whittle down your work to it's most basic ingredients. Like food, it in fact the simplest things that are the hardest to execute because of the required precision and control of body to perform them.

I'll leave you with the following:

Some lovely points Kumudini made, which I just wanted to share directly (making no comment on the truth of these):

"It is better to be a bad original than a perfect copy."

"What is the real difference between the dances of India? It is whether they are based on Krishna or Shiva." She went on to explain her theory - kathak, kuchipudi - these are based on the lightness of Krishna. Odissi, Bharatanatyam - within the strength of Shiva.  What was really interesting was the division has nothing to do with technique, simply the mood that the dance conveys.

There was a point, also, where she described her theory as to why the hands are where they are below in this common kathak pose:

Kumudini's opinion (which differed from that of her guru's and spoke that it was simply her interpretation, NOT right or wrong) was that the hand pointing upwards was the idea that kathak was infinite, like the sky it references. The hand pointing outwards, was to the horizon, always showing that there is more to learn, more to grow, more to explore.

Sanskrit, dance, and music books of particular use

1. The language of the Gods in the World of Men (Sheldon Pollack)
2. Karanas: Common Dance Codes of India, Volumes 1 and 2 (Padma Subramanyam)
3. The Invention of Tradition (Hobsbaum and Ranger)
4. A Precise History of India (Metcalf and Metcalf)
5. At Home in the World: Bharatanatyam on the Global Stage (Janet O' Shea)
6. Between Theater and Anthropology (Richard Schechner)
7. Natyashastra (Ghosh)
8. Abhinaya Darpana (which translation works best?)
9. The Yoga of Indian Dance (Mandakini Trivedi) - to help understand how dancers perceive their work now in the globalized scheme of things.
10. Puranas (again, translation choice...)
11. Playing in the Dark (Toni Morrison) - I wonder if her application of the analysis of the use of the African American in books written before civil rights allows us to also understand the European - Indian relationship)
12. The Indus Valley: New Perspectives (Jane R. McIntosh) - to get a feel for the history of where many pinpoint showed the first signs of "Indian" arts
13. Art of the First Cities: The Third Millennium B.C. from the Mediterranean to the Indus (Metropolitan Museum of Art Series) by Joan Aruz
14. The Indus Civiliazation by Mortimer Wheeler - again, to understand the "beginning" so to speak
15. Ka by Roberto Calasso - to understand reinterpretations
16. The Clay Library Sanskrit Series - translations of actual plays (to mark similarities in metaphor and use of description and extrapolation in dance and music now)
17. Sanskrit Play Production in Ancient India (Performing Arts Series) by Tarla Mehta
18. Silipadikaram: The Lay of the Ankle Bracelet - this book was used to pinpoint and understand early arts in India
19. Kutiyattam: Sanskrit Theater of India - as one of the forms considered most unchanged in the past few thousand years, it is good to see where it's come from
20. Theatre in Ancient India by Siddheswar Chattopadhyay
21. Contemporary Indian Dance: New Creative Choreography in India and the Diaspora (Studies in International Performance) by Ketu H. Katrak
22. Audience Participation: Essays on Inclusion in Performance (Contributions in Drama and Theatre Studies) by Susan Kattwinkel - ideas on rasa, one of the most important components of the Indian aesthetic theory
23. Time in Indian Music: Rhythm, Metre, and Form in North Indian Rag Performance (Oxf Monographs Music Ncs) by Martin Clayton
24. Two Men and Music: Nationalism in the Making of an Indian Classical Tradition by Janaki Bakhle
25. The Rags of North Indian Music: Their Structure and Evolution by Nazir Ali Jairazbhoy
26. History of South Indian (Carnatic) music, from Vedic times to the present by R Rangaramanuja Iyengar
27. The Ragas of Somanatha: History and Analysis, Musical Examples (Asian Studies) by Emmie te Nijenhuis (Aug 1997)
28. Indian Classical Dance: Tradition in Transition by Leela Venkataraman and Avinash Pasricha - a particularly good book to understand the current "Indian from India" mindset
29. Indian Dance: The Ultimate Metaphor by Shanta Serbjeet Singh
30. Nationalist Thought and the Colonial World: A Derivative Discourse by Partha Chatterjee
31. Rasa: Performing the Divine in India by Susan L. Schwartz
32. Thanjavur: A Cultural History by Pradeep Chakravarthy and Vikram Sathyanathan - particularly important because this is a major change in south indian dance and music history and execution
33. Bollywood and Globalization: Indian Popular Cinema, Nation, and Diaspora (Anthem South Asian Studies) by Rini Bhattacharya Mehta and Rajeshwari V. Pandharipande - it would be good to note how Bollywood borrows and plays a role in all of this
34. Impossible Desires: Queer Diasporas and South Asian Public Cultures (Perverse Modernities) by Gayatri Gopinath (I also wonder how the cross-dressing, role-playing, and gender issues may or may not come into play in all this)
35. Balasaraswati: Her Art and Life by Douglas M. Knight (a staunch advocate who kept away from sanskritization of the body, whereas rukmini devi did otherwise)
36. Unfinished Gestures: Devadasis, Memory, and Modernity in South India (South Asia Across the Disciplines) by Devesh Soneji
37. Singing the Classical, Voicing the Modern (Amanda J. Weidman)
38. Dance Research Journal 36/2 (2004)
39. Rethinking Dance History: A Reader by Alexandra Carter
40. DVDs: Kalakshetra,
41. Nayikas: The Clay Library Series: Sheldon Pollack
42. Translations of Shakuntala and Other Works by Kalidasa (or from the Raghuvamsa as translated in one of my classes)
43. Ãndandavardhana's classic on poetics, the Dhvanyāloka (which introduces the santa, or peace, rasa)
44. St. Thyagaraja, the divine singer: His life and teachings, by Shuddhananda Bharati
45. Mahābhāṣya by Patañjali (contains the first seeds of Sanskrit drama and poetry)


Topics I cannot find enough books on: rasa theory, or the introduction of the bhakti rasa, and obviously on ancient sanskrit drama traditions

The codification of Sanskirt poetry and literature into Indian classical dance and music

I think, after everything I've learned, that I do believe there is a traceable lineage of evolution between sanskrit poetry and Indian performance arts. I say this in reference to my post on The Invention of Tradition, and definitely keeping in mind all of my confusion about where bharatanatyam has grown from. I think there are definite ruptures, but in the grand scheme of things, it is an evolution of sorts.

I am going to make this a point of my research over the next year, really trying to understand what happened from the Sanskrit literary tradition to dance and music. Here are the unofficial reasons for my hypothesis:

1. When poets would read Sanskrit literature way back when (not sure of the date) they would use hand gestures while they were speaking to help people understand the meaning of what they were saying. Whether this was an acoustic thing or just extra, who knows? But I wonder if this is a pre-cursor to mudras.

2. During recitation of slokas, etc, people started to assign specific pitches at specific times. Could this in turn indicate some sort of precursor for ragas? Eventually this was also implemented with specific hand gestural use.

These two things sparked my interest. What actually happened to separate literature from drama, and then drama from dance and music? There used to be a saying: "without language, music, and dance, there is no art". Obviously we view these 3 as separate, distinct categories now. How did that happen?

More to come on books I have to read in order to further probe this topic.

Nrtta Hastas

Did you know there are nrtta hastas listed in the Natyashastra specifically used for nrtta? I had no idea - I thought there were just the 28 asamyuta hastas (one hand gestures). I am going to look up these in my copy of the Natyashastra and make them available to you here.

Interesting, isn't it, how much we take from the Natyashastra and at the same time how much we ignore?

Definitely proof of why you can move past texts to choreograph within classical dances.

Aristotle's Poetics -- An analysis by Stephen Halliwell

On page 37 of this analysis, Halliwell says:

"...It is...the primary purpose of the Poetics to establish a philosophical framework for the understanding of poetry in general, and to do so in a way which entails the statement and advocacy of criteria of poetic excellence. The treatise is in this sense both theoretical and prescriptive. But it has sometimes been believed that it is also prescriptive in a stronger and more pragmatic sense: that it sets out to instruct poets or would-be poets in the methods of composition itself."

I wonder if the Natyashastra and rasa theory as analyzed by Abhinavagupta is somewhat the same. Most historians agree that the Natyashastra was NOT prescriptive but rather described the arts as it was performed when it was written. (Theorized to be 500 BC to 500 AD, if I recollect properly). However, I think it is extremely difficult to analyze such methodology in detail without ultimately becoming also prescriptive.

The Natyashastra nowadays is definitely a prescriptive text. But if you think about it, it is comparable to a book like Aristotle's Poetics. Which allows for more leeway than one would think - it is now a text actually written by someone, who, for all intents and purposes, can't be right about everything. Is there anyone out there who would analyze, and above all, challenge the Natyashastra?

The Obsession with Sita and Sight, Part 3: The Backlash and Traditional Values

If you're new to this blog, this is the first of a 4 part series of posts trying to explain why there has been a great deal of performances in the Indian arts community from the female perspective starting from around the 80's.

In the last post, we alluded to the idea that some of it may have been the second wave of feminism.  However, the global trend of feminism does not explain why so many of these re-tellings concentrate on Indian epics, especially pinpointing Sita in the Ramayana...

This is something that I believe to be a combination of “the backlash effect” and “traditional values”.

The “backlash effect” is a constant in the world of trend analysis.  In every subject, whether it be music, dance, academics, math, or even socially, there is something I shall dub “the backlash effect” – the destruction lurking at the edge of every trend, the implication that its impending doom will result in the opposing idea becoming the new trend. As trends become more popular, the “backlash effect” comes in the form of opposition that becomes stronger and larger until the trend reaches an extreme and the opposition group reacts so vehemently that the trend crumbles and the opposition group becomes the new rising trend. Some come sooner than others (which can be as simple and small as the backlash in fashion over a year or two: in the 1990s high waisted jeans were the fashion and now it is super low waisted jeans) to something much more long and enduring such as the use of women’s bodies to tout Indian morals.

Gasp, what did I just say?

Women have been the subjects of much oppression in India; the rising feminist trend finally allowing for the backlash it was due for. Their subsequent rise in their oppression came during the fight for independence, where the trend became to fight the war over control for women’s’ bodies. People heading the conservative movement, also called the “traditionalist movement” -- opposing the British, and fighting for independence -- actually, in many cases, led the oppression of women.

Eg: The British tried to instate laws banning child marriages, and often spoke of the barbarianism of Indians for allowing things such as sati to happen.(7) Indians reacted by referring to their ancient texts such as the Vedas and the Manu Smriti to find proof that these acts were in fact Indian and banning them was an insult to Indian tradition. Many of these laws were fought over how women were to be dealt with: child marriages were young females to old men; sati was the act of a widowed women throwing herself on a funeral pyre under the pretense of unconditional love for the husband; dowry deaths were along the same line of thinking. And Indians were finding proof in ancient texts proving the essence of such acts to Indian culture. The government would even look to women within ancient Indian texts to use as role models for the country. The most significant figure of the women’s cultural and Indian nationalism movement during the fight for independence was the government’s use of Sita in the Ramayana. Lauded as the perfect wife and female, women were told to act and be like her.

Which leads back to the original question.  Why do so many of these reinterpretations deal with the Ramayana?. The reason for this is more than its popularity and lies in an inherent backlash against Sita. Sita, who threw herself into a fire when her husband questioned her purity. Sita, whose image could have been pointed to when a connection was needed to sati. Sita, whose image was pointed to when a woman decided to speak up in order to silence her. Sita, for all she was supposed to be an ideal of women, was in fact an oppressor during the independence movement. How can females of this age not blame her for so much of what happened to them during the independence movement?

Yet, when the backlash effect occurred, it didn’t happen as simply a rejection of Sita. It was a transformation of Sita outright. Just as African Americans in the U.S. changed the word “nigger” from a racial slur to a brotherly term (albeit amongst themselves) women turned Sita from a figure that signified oppression, victimization, and timidity to one that signified power and strength. Yet Sita’s transformation was for different reasons. An outright denunciation of Sita was akin to a denunciation of India and Indian values. The seeds of nationalism had been planted just a few years back and their resultant blooms had not ceased to flourish. Just because there was oppression doesn’t mean women resented the feelings of cultural pride being instilled in them. Nationalism is a pervading power all its own and the oppression of the British was far worse in their minds. So while many disliked Sita, rather than rejecting her outright, they tried to find a way to rationalize her.

This is also reflected in the duality of using Indian Classical Dance as a basis for these reinterpretations. It was, at this point, now considered a high art, the pride and joy of Indian traditions. So using "traditional" classical Indian dance was both a means of keeping the culture in tact while also using the art form to extol very non-traditional ideas. This methodology not only gave their arguments more acceptance, but also an argument technique: dancers were able to utilize the same lyrics, the same books, and the same music the conservative/independence movement used and find a completely opposing meaning to it.

Why was this argument methodology used?  Why not just create new characters, or use other mythological stories?  Again, the nationalism and pride people have in their own culture is not to be overlooked.  The beauty and importance of these books in Indian culture is something I - and many others - have fierce pride in.  By using the other side’s evidence in support of our own ideas we are able to both negate what we didn't like about their interpretation of the mythological Indian women and even praise them at the same time while exalting Indian literature, culture and art.

Very clever indeed.

(7) Maju, Daruwal. "Central Sati Act - an Analysis." PUCL. July 1988. Apr. 2008 .

The Obsession with Sita and Sight, Part 1

I’ve always had a great interest in women and feminism in dance and Indian mythology.  But a few years back, two things happened.

1) I took a course called South Asia: Continuity and Change taught by Professor Uttara Coorlawala and read several articles about the "male gaze".
2) I suddenly took note of the a ridiculous amount of performances/artwork obsessed with retelling stories, particularly from a female perspective.*

*(Her Story by Srinidhi Raghavan and Sahasra Sambamoorthi; Stree by Mythili Prakash; Sita Kavya by Krithika Rajagopalan; Shakthi, The Power of Women by Mallika Sarabhai; Sthree by Ragamala Dance Theater; The Palace of Illusions by Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni; Sita's Daughters by Mallika Sarabhai; Sita's Story (unverified title) by Chandralekha; Sita Sings the Blues by Nina Paley; Sitayana by Srinivasa Iyengar to name some of the more popular few that I knew of)

What was this artistic obsession with giving women a voice through art? Where was it coming from? The final straw occurred when I saw Sita Sings the Blues at the Tribeca Film Festival.  The topic was everywhere I turned, essentially inescapable. And so I became intrigued.

It is a vast amount of subject material I have undertaken and a difficult topic to explain completely, and years of research can only really do justice to it. However, I have attempted to offer an analysis based on the evidence I have found (much of it observational) in the hopes that it might spark later discussions.

As I have pointed out, there is a clear and rising trend of the feminist point of view being touted and extolled by the dance world.  This has been particularly true of the Indian community, retelling its ancient lore through the mediums of art and writing, from simple ideas such as removing it from poetry form and into prose to more complex ideas such as telling them from a different perspective.

This global trend has concentrated on much of the same subject matter over the past 20 years, growing in size every year. The greater bulk of them are of the performing arts variety, concentrating on retelling it from a female point of view and furthermore retelling the Ramayana from Sita’s perspective. It all leads to one question:

Why?

Though there are a vast multitude of reasons and probably hundreds of influences; many of them boil down to or are derivatives of four simple ideas. These four reasons I have named as “The Feminist Trend”; “The Backlash Effect”; “The Indian Interpretation”; and “Traditional Values”; are also all connected themselves, intertwined in a way that makes them difficult to separate and explain...

Hopefully you're intrigued enough to check back over the next few weeks as I've attempted to clarify it over a few separate posts...enjoy my fumbling attempts :)

Sitayana: Epic of the earth-born = Sitayanam

The "So You Think You Can Dance" Formula

The most interesting pieces from So You Think You Can Dance - and usually, the most popular - all follow the same piece wise structure, like a pop song does (quiet beginning, add instruments, catchy verse, loud hook and end).

For hip hop:

Beginning: Allude to storyline, usually a guy and girl in love.
Middle: Break out from the introduction of the story/characters with a series of complex movements in synchronization.
Next: Do a series of individual complex movements and/or duet stunts.
End: Resolve the story with some sort of "quip" ending alluding back to the characters here.

For contemporary:

Beginning: Allude to storyline
Middle*: Separate out to do your own thing, then allude back to the story line in a count
Next*: Break out stunts
End: Resolve with no resolution, alluding back to the storyline.

*The two starred steps may intertwine...and this is far less structured than the hip hop pieces, but there's definitely a pattern to it.

Example: (And don't get me wrong, I think this is brilliant anyway):

Shut Up and Dance? Really?

ANIRUDDHAN VASUDEVAN

          I read a quote somewhere that was attributed to Samuel Beckett: “Dance first, think later.” I do not know if he really suggested that sequence. But I wonder if it works that way all the time. He might even have used “dance” in the sense of celebration, revelry, letting go. But dance as art practice, even as it has all of these, is hardly just that. It may not be truly possible to separate dance and thought into two neat, separate boxes. Thoughts can dance their way into our heads sometimes; thoughts can impede movement at times.

          So we may not be able to put aside thought for later after all. Specialized thought, particularly academic and intellectual discourse, may have huge impacts on an activity like dancing. It could freeze you momentarily; lurk around the corner you are about to turn and cast a petrifying charm on you.       

          Despite these seemingly discouraging effects, theorizing is an exciting process for me; as much as dancing is. A commitment to theorizing essentially means allowing self-reflexive ruptures into practices - having small and big explosions of insights into one’s performance of, adherence to, and association with social, political, cultural and economic practices (this is the unpacking of the term self-reflexive. Let us use the terms even as we unpack them). Some of these ruptures could take the form of epiphanies that change the course of a person’s life and practice of art into brilliant directions at once. Some might find theory and politics immediately empowering. For many others, an engagement with theory could sharpen the edge of self-reflexivity and drive it as a wedge between the self and its practices, the body and its performance, the individual and her/his self-narrative. Here’s my experience!
          I started learning Bharata Natyam when I was 6 years old, on the Vijayadasami day of the year 1988 in my hometown, Kumbakonam. Initially, it was just plain, unadulterated joy to be dancing; the kind of unreflective joy that is a prerogative of childhood – the kind of exercise where you hear a huge “YES” in your head every time you think about it. Kumbakonam has a strong presence in Hindu mythology and south Indian history as a pilgrim site and a business centre for the Cholas. The Iyengar¹ community I come from also has an embedded history in this space. My family could demonstrate, with great ease, its link to the town and its temples for several generations, notwithstanding the fact that a few generations before us had not lived there. Therefore, there was an easy coherence to my childhood self-narrative - the way I thought of and spoke about myself - dancing included.
          However, such innocence was not to last. Dance became a zone rife with questions of self-identity during and after adolescence, because of the gender inflections it began to receive. It was an issue for the boys in the classroom and hence became an issue for me. As an activist now, I may reclaim “sissy” and wear it on a pink badge, but the intensity of such reclamations usually says a lot about the strength of the wounds. Despite these issues, there never was an impasse, or a deliberation of quitting dance. In fact, the same dance that made life as a boy complex and rife with everyday negotiations of power in school also became a therapeutic space. But dance, I started realizing, was going to be a difficult space. It was not going to be the romantic forget-your-worries-and-dance kind of a space. This was because dancing was singling me out from the boys of my age. This alienation and the anxieties it provoked were to last into adulthood.
          Much later, something else, that initially appeared innocuous, made dancing - dancing Bharata Natyam specifically - very hard for me. It was the exposure to scholarship that historicized and theorized Bharata Natyam²  that dealt the major blow to my emotional affinities to it that I refused to scrutinize. But it was not the revisionist understanding, per se, of Bharata Natyam that was difficult for me to deal with. That Bharata Natyam was not an ancient art form but was one constituted by ruptures with tradition was, in itself, not a disconcerting fact. But the fact that these ruptures were located within the politics of caste, nationalism, gender, sexuality and religion was the specific locus of quiet but disabling anxiety for me. For almost all of these categories already had a not-taken-for-granted aspect in my life: a brahmin boy from Kumbakonam, with parents who had strong anti-brahminical and anti-casteist personalities, a boy who was beginning to understand that he desired boys, a boy who has been called "sissy" in three different languages, a Hindu boy with strong misgivings about religion.
          One result of all this exposure was a deeper and defamiliarized look at different aspects of Bharata Natyam. For instance, the nauseating claims to spirituality that were being made (I quite literally grew up among these voices) were making "spirituality" itself a term and domain in need of active reclaiming. If I am now a spiritual person and a Bharata Natyam performer, it is also true that I am a sexual person and a Bharata Natyam performer. In fact, my sexuality is more in the public domain, as a visible problematic, than my spirituality. Also, once I could clearly see the strong hetero-patriarchy permeating the texts and practice of Bharata Natyam, it became an absolute necessity for me to see what subject space I could claim within it. I needed to know if I could be feminist and queer and still find a location within Bharata Natyam to “speak” from, without feeling compromised. I also needed to know if I could find a way to happily marry off aesthetics and politics in a relationship that constantly sustained the tension between them, without attempting, naively, to "resolve" it.
          Adrienne Rich, American poet, talks somewhere about the importance of announcing one's subject position; to be aware of and make clear where one speaks from. My dilemma has been in recognizing my subject position with all its limitations and simultaneous centralities and marginalites – caste, class, gender, sexuality, etc. Announcing/ declaring it is a simultaneous concern. I will not sequentialize them. I don't think the (re)cognition and announcing of one's subject position are sequential acts. Most of the times, I have known my own positions only in the stating of them.
          Modern scholarships on Bharata Natyam, history, casteism and politics have made access to a lot of things suddenly very mediated and anxiety-ridden for me. They have made me see the complex links between identity and performance, both as everyday modes of being in the world as well as specialized and staged performance. And that I think is quite excellent. As a gendered and sexualized subject with a caste and class identity in modern India, I see that Bharata Natyam is not just dance for me. It is a practice I engage in, that is at once crisscrossed by several histories; histories that have also written themselves over my body. These are histories not just of community, art and excellence. They are also, very significantly, histories of gender and caste oppression, notions of masculinity and sexuality, even the history of the idea of the Nation.
          Theorizing my relationship with Bharata Natyam, hence, amounts to theorizing myself from a few perspectives. It is an instance of acquired knowledge playing upon one's notion of the given. It offers new ways of re-imagining oneself. But it has taken sometime to be able to attenuate the edges of my anxiety with the understanding that I can re-fashion and re-imagine my selfhood; that the seemingly innocent prefix "re-" powerfully questions the givenness of the givens themselves. Until learning to live in and appreciate liminal zones and interstitial crevices, until learning to willingly make myself vulnerable (for I now think that a true way for me to relate to another is by dis-covering my vulnerabilities), I felt both dancing and speech had been made difficult for me. I thought every movement I executed and every utterance I made were screaming my location to the world - what I saw as the incongruity in being a Bharata Natyam dancer/ Brahmin boy and an anti-hetero-patriarchal, same-sex loving self, social worker, activist, etc. But to this day I find myself ‘doing’ Bharata Natyam, attempting to find new ways to sing my own songs, dance my own dance, as it were. I am thankful for the existence of these etceteras; they allow me new and unknown possibilities of being.

Notes
(1) People of the Brahmin Vaishnava (worshippers of Vishnu) community in this part of the country are called Iyengars. The priestly caste in the Tamil region have Iyers and Iyengars as broad sub-groups, with several sub-communities under each, with various levels of interior hierarchization. 

² Bharata Natyam has a history of discontinuity from that of Sadir, the dance form performed by devadasis and rajadasis in the temples and courts of south India until the early decades of the twentieth century. This history is located in the politically charged space of colonial reformist movement that sought to end dancing in temples and the dedication of women to temples. This culminated in the passing of the Devadasi Bill in the Madras Legislative Council, spearheaded by Dr Muthulakshmi Reddy. The revival of  Sadir as Bharata Natyam is attributed to people like Rukmini Devi Arundale and E Krishna Iyer and to institutions like the Madras Music Academy. For more on this, see Srinivasan, Amrit. 1985. ‘Reform and Revival: The Devadasi and her Dance’. Economic and Political Weekly, 20: 1869-76

Uttara Coorlawala's "It matters for whom you dance"

The first NYC dance community meeting in 2010 brought a lot of interesting questions, stories, and thoughts.  One in particular stood out in my head: Professor Coorlawala's answer to Sridhar Shanmugan upon being asked this question:


Sridharji asked Professor, "Uttara, there was this one moment in this dance you did where you'd throw three flowers and they'd land in a straight line. No matter where you performed it, for what audience, or what knowledge base, in that moment the audience would be brought to tears.  How did you do that, or what was it that brought that about?" (I admit, this quote is not exact, but carries the gist of what he asked):


And Uttara looked steadily around at each one of us, smiling and said, "Do you want to know what my secret is?" The intensity of her question brought a round of enthusiastic encouragement. Quietly, slowly, deliberately, and with her calm manner she continued gazing at all of us and said, "It was because every time, in that moment, I would be dancing for my guru.  It was always for him."


The clarity with which she spoke, the raw passion within her voice - the room was silenced and everyone stared at her, a few with tears dotted within their eyes.  I could only imagine what power the performance itself actually had if verbally she could capture us so.


I assume that this was what spawned her to write “It Matters For Whom You Dance: Reception in Rasa Theory” on the aspect of audience participation in Abhinavagupta's rasa theory.  I've included an excerpt below that I find outlines or abstracts the article, and this idea, particularly well: (The republication of this article is in Dance Matters, Performing India Edited by Pallabi Chakravorty and Nilanjana Gupta, Routledge 2010 pp117-139.)

"...Performing the same solo concert in major Indian cities and for not-so-metropolitan audiences taught me that performance is an ongoing dialogue between performer and audience.

Audience members indicated their preferences by the way that they attended to the event, drawing closer, becoming restive, still, or discussing the dance even as it was occurring. Some audiences gave love and support, others drained energy into a consuming black hole. Some bore witness to an inner journey adding their intensity and experience into the mix of my body memories. Others withdrew in resistance.


Finally, in the early eighties, I had the great joy of performing on three separate occasions for the rasikā (ideal spectator) of my innermost desires,  my spiritual guru Swami Muktananda Paramahamsa or “Baba.” As I continued to travel and perform internationally, I realized that my ideal spectator had transformed my awareness of performance; that each performance subtly and profoundly clarified and intensified my awareness of audiences and of dancing. In seeking to understand more on this mysterious and wonderful dialogue between performer-audience, I found it exemplified in live performances, in stories about performers and most profoundly in the theoretical expositions of bhāva and in the ways that dances can be deliberately structured so as to ensure that viewers remain active and alert...


The Ideal Spectator or Rasikā:
In Indian dance, the performer-audience relationship has historically been considered crucial in determining the quality of performances. If a performance is to be deemed successful, there must be rasa. But it is not the performer's responsibility to evoke rasa. The performer's role is to represent the prescribed emotional moods or bhāva with sustained clear focus. Sattva, or the luminous communicative energy (presence serves as a partial synonym) that results from the performer’s bodily activities and mental focus becomes flavoured, as it were, with the 3 appropriate emotions - bhāva. The sympathetic (sa-hridaya) but critically discerning viewer (rasikā) apprehends this emotion not as a cathartic experience, but as rasa (NātyaŚastra, Chapter 27, verses 49-58 hereafter written as NS 27, 49-58). “Rasa” literally translates as that which is tasted, relished. Rasa is a reflective experience of tasting, rather than of devouring or being devoured by emotions. Rasa involves seeing with an inner eye, hearing resonances, and touching inner spaces. Until the poem is read, it has no existence. Unless the spatial aesthetic and symbolic characteristics of a sculpture are apprehended, it is no more than inert stone. An image of a deity in the temple, a moorti, remains just another icon, until the worshipper is transformed in its presence. Without at least one viewer to taste, (even when that viewer is The Unseen Witness) there cannot be a performance.


This leisurely inner savoring of a performance or a work of art is not only a mental practice assiduously cultivated by those educated in traditional Indian arts and literary forms. The intensity of this experience of rasa is the measure by which success is evaluated. Rasa may involve a spontaneous experience of insight (pratyaksha). Very often, a performer in Indian dance will attribute a spontaneous flash of creative improvisation to the presence of rasikā(s). Accomplished and master performers build audience dialogue into their presentations:


After performing a few items Birju Maharaj said he was very uncomfortable and requested that the overhead nontheatrical lighting be turned on, so that he could see the faces of the audience. He spoke in English (which he rarely speaks) for his invited guests who were unfamiliar with Kathak. Once the lights were turned on, he appeared to be more at ease, structuring his presentation according to the responses of the audience and playing off their moods. At the end of the performance, when he was being showered with applause he said in wonder, that it was the heart of the audience that had inspired him, that he had found himself performing with insights and subtleties that surprised him; he did not know from where they came, but that it had to do with ‘the heart of the audience.’ He said that the rasa of this performance would surely remain with him for a week. And the reverse unfortunately holds true too. At one of Balasaraswati's appearances at the Jacob's Pillow theatre, she is said to have cut short her performance. When asked about this she is said to have felt that the audience had been insensitive to her art. However, she declared that she would not be averse to performing for the students and faculty on that same evening after the paying public went home. Apparently she did just that and held them enthralled. So goes this story told by Ted Shawn in one of his ‘curtain speeches’ to educate American dancegoers to performer-audience conventions of other cultures."

Rasa Theory in a few lines

Rasa theory is based on the idea that you can have a transcendental experience through art.

Interestingly enough, this is the simple philosophy as to why:

Say you see Romeo and Juliet on the stage. It's a great rendition, and you have the experience that people like to say is an immersion experience. You seem to forget about the world around you, and begin to empathize with the characters. So, what is it that you are feeling?

Is it Romeo and Juliet's love for each other? No, because they don't exist.

Is it your love for Romeo? No, because he is fictional and you are not.

Is it a past experience of love that you are experiencing? No, because it perhaps does not exist now in time, or you may not have experienced it at all yet.

So then what is it? You are certainly experiencing something, even though clearly it is something that does not exist as you seem to know it. It must, in that case, be true love, unmarred by earthly bounds. Real, unadulterated, unbiased love. The universal love.

In other words, the viewer is able to transcend the human emotional feeling of love and experience truth in the form of love on a different plane altogether. And, if you apply this to religious love and devotion, the same rules apply by simply creating great religious theater. By creating devotion on stage, you can experience true devotion mentally.

Granted rasa has strict rules you must follow to experience this, but this is the basic idea.

Universality of Emotions

I wonder a lot if this is true, and if so, it's affects on abhinaya and what it means for a dancer trying to express stories through facial expressions to a global crowd.

But there are a lot of culturally learned ways of displaying emotions as well. Note the recent investigations of an anthropologist who realized that eastern and western emoticons might be different for a reason as well...

And then how does rasa theory play into all of this? Oxytocin seems to play a role in how well we interpret emotions on a very general sixth sense level, and training also allows us to understand micro-expressions extremely well (like Paul Ekman's research).

I wonder if a study can be created to isolate and understand these components in how we understand art?

This is certainly an incomplete post. More to be pondered later.

Other resources:
Paul Ekman
Charles Darwin, The Expression of the Emotions in Man and Animals

Why I am starting this blog

I had a lot to say about dance. Some of it inane, some of it pure speculation, some of it highly personal. That was when I stumbled across Sanskrit, the study of which has quickly become one of my favorite things to do.

Thus, this blog is about the amazing things I learn about the two, a lot of it inspiring random theories and ideas that I'd like to keep track of. And believe me, the word random doesn't even come close to describing the weird connections I make with these subjects and seemingly unrelated ideas.

I am not grammatically correct all the time, my writing could use more eloquence, (hey, blame writing technical papers for 6 years) but I will eventually get my point across. To be perfectly honest, I don't know that I'll be 100% correct about every fact I put on here, but I will try my best, give references, and will absolutely fix any mistakes if I am informed of them! Take it with a grain of salt, as this blog is an outlet of passion and I'm just starting out in my research. But with a little luck it won't hinder you from understanding it and/or garnering inspiration, and if you give it a chance, you'll probably love this stuff too!