Bharatanatyam at Wesleyan University

Every year Wesleyan University hosts a Navaratri Festival featuring music, dance, foods and traditions of India.  Back in 1992 I directed a multi-cultural dance concert.  One of the performers was a girl who did Bharatanatyam.  She was wonderful!  I still have the video of the concert and vow one day to convert it to DVD.  So, today I went to Wesleyan and saw two wonderful dancers perform.  One, Rachna Ramya Agrawal,  performed the Luchnow style of Kathak dance- something about which I know nothing!  It was quite different from Bharatanatyam and involved a lot of stamped foot work, sometimes similar to tap (now there's a root I neglected in my research for the tap exhibit for the National Dance Museum)!

Bharatanatyam, today performed by the lovely Swathi Kamakshi, in contrast is far more stylized in its poses and forms.  As a classical dancer, I think I relate more to the bharatanatyam.  Something I find frequently among eastern performers is their use of silence and stillness.  We, in the west, tend to assume a piece is over as soon as there is stillness.  I noticed this once at a performance of Kodo Drummers.  Silence is a part of the performance, offsetting the drum and providing dynamic.  Often however, the audience would start applauding assuming the piece was over.  A musician friend who is a professor at a university in New York told me that the difference between amateur musicians and professionals is the attention they give to the spaces between the notes.  I mused on this and told him it is the same with dancers.  The difference between a professional and an amateur is paying attention to the transitions between the steps.  In dance the use of a breath or a momentary rest no matter how fleeting between steps, the timing of the transition, paying attention to technique in that transition (like turn-out for example) make the difference between something flowing seemingly effortlessly and looking like it is behind the music or poorly executed.

I was also quite captivated by the use of mime and facial expression by both dancers and the use of gesture and hand movements.  I imagine it would be quite effective to take some elements of the mime and gestures as well as a little of the poses from the bharatanatyam and use them to inform the choreography in La Bayadere, a ballet about a temple dancer set in India.  Boston Ballet's La Bayadere opens next Thursday, November 4th.  It is one of my favorite ballets and the full length version is not performed too often in the United States, so I am looking forward to it.  Take a look at the videos here.  One is of Swathi Kamakshi performing bharatanatyam.  The second is the Paris Opera Ballet's La Bayadere with Isabelle Guerin.  The third is a clip of Boston Ballet.  Enjoy!