This is a lot about two professionals easily the best in their pursuits who can weave sheer magic with their work about whom I have been following only through the published articles , interviews and write ups about them and interacting with them off and on through social media platforms and just once did meet one of them at a social level at home. But the encounter of the great professionals at their work stunned me and Smitha beyond belief and each stood out as stupendous icons of their own by their sheer dexterity of art and professional prowess. It was an evening to remember. 

Yes there were other dancers as well each amazingly superior in their own way at the "Looking Back to move forward" dance festival at IIC Delhi. But these two were personally special to us and even otherwise the best that can ever be. Purva Dhanashree could manage to put her her entire over two decades of practice as Vilasini Natyam dancer and researcher in a capsule in just one little over ten minutes song of flowers "puvvalu patta". She simply and with great agility and fluidity became a medium to communicate the ecstasy felt by her soul to us who watched her from below the stage. It was a celebration in time where time stopped, it was artistry that could have no parallel. 

Time that Purva stopped by her dance remained still and even the God who created the world decided to keep his eyes closed for eternity perhaps after having achieved the limit of his creation! 

Dr Vasudevan Sridhar who enacted the creation of this world by the God almighty as narrated by Ravi Subramaniam the contemporary Tamil Poet, could bring out with greatest possible detail as to how God perhaps had gone about his job. With amazing footwork, flexibility and pure poetry of body moments Vasu painted a moving picture of how the world got created one step at a time , one creature, one plant, one tree, one hillock ......each with its own beauty by God almighty and all created in a wink when God opened his eyes saw the vast sky and earth bereft of life. 

Each creation Vasu brought forth by his magical dance moments had its own sense of purpose and place in the world that God created. God went into a idyllic self-fulfilling rejoiceful trance after He created humans who excelled beyond his own expectations. Personally I have never seen anything as close to storytelling in detail as to what Vasu accomplished that evening. 

I may have been partial to my chosen ones whom I respect and I admire most but the work of few of the others featured in the group photograph that we got to see as part of the three day festival put together by Manasa-Art Frontiers in collaboration with IIC once again made me hopeful of the current generation preserving and vastly improving the body of work the great masters have left behind for the posterity. The Mayur Banj Chau by Carolina Prada with her troupe ably highlighted the eternal quest for wealth and power by humans culminating in realising the God within after understanding how all that is material is unreal while God alone is eternal. 

The beautiful Divya Goswami in her Kathak solo brought forth admirably the ecstasy of a girl seeing the beauty of dawn and her sweet desire to wake up her friend also to join her in her magical morning reminded one of Sri Andal's Thiruppavai a celestial song composition urging the girls to wake up and join her in the early morning worship of God almighty in the month of margazhi. Tanya Saxena through Bharathnatyam could with great feelings bring out the pathos and sheer ecstacy all at the same time of the two river Goddesses Padma and Ganga as they flowed through the land which went through vicissitudes of time to become East Bengal first, then East Pakistan and now Bangladesh while sharing the same history and culture of the neighbouring West Bengal (shortly Bangla). 

Tanya had such tremendous energy and great imagination to bring forth the greatly mixed emotions of people who lived in these two tracts of Ganga sharing the same culture over the centuries. Katyayini Gupta through Kroora Hridya Megha song called out to the recalcitrant clouds to pour forth for life to flourish on earth. Her Bharathnatyam rendering of the cruel cloud's antics left one breathless with sheer happiness. God bless the youngster. The background singers and musicians were amazing in their rendering and also their stamina to last through the three hour repertoire! The credit for putting together the show on July 26, should go to the two great stalwarts of dance Sharon Lowen who also had her own photo exhibition of her 45 years of dedication to dance in India and Kamalini Dutt the famous dance historian and archivist who was the founder director of Doordsrshan's archives.

Photos of Purva Dhanashree & Dr Sridhar Vasudevan are from their respective webpages

I have been fascinated by four  dancers each answering different cultures, dance styles, cities and even ages and yet all four have in their own sustained my own interest in classical dance and made me write this blog after quite a gap.
First what is that which is sustaining me who is a perfect stranger to this art form and almost an illiterate when it comes to the techniques and nuances of dance or even music. I know no ragas, nor do I know any thalas and of course I have zero knowledge in bhavas, nritya and timings. I have nothing to offer when it comes to knowledge of dance and yet I have sustained this blog for nearly a decade purely hoping someday to attain the knowledge and depth necessary to turn myself into a critic rather than a casual bystander which is what I am today. I am writing this blog without overtly describing personalities or their rendering.  Aiswarya Ramakrishnan, a young Kuchipudi exponent of considerable depth and tremendous grasp of the techniques of this unique dance form from deep Andhra Pradesh.

Aiswarya Ramakrishnan

This girl is fascinating  as she is so well focused on dance as a career that she literally fought tooth and nail to get there being born into a prosperous middle class family of professionals. Father being a banker wouldnt listen to anything other than writing the bank officers exam and bagging the coveted job like for the life time Fortunately the kids Mom and her father are carnatic vocal singers themselves and Aiswarya herself is an accomplished vocalist.
he one who has fascinated me of late is an amazing dancer  who belong to the modern generation of a mixed race coming from a rich cultural family of considerable standing and reputation.

Being a  Young Dancer!

It is amazing to be young especially when it comes to Art like Dance though it also means responsibility at a very early age if you want to make it right to the top. Like most other professions Dance requires  early start, rigorous training and above all dedication. There is no such thing  as shaking a leg in a party and being called a good  dancer.  Also of course, there has to be some inborn talent for blossoming as a professional  even though this is not a precondition  as such.  There have been many who started out fairly late and yet made it very big without any  early signs of being a dancer.
But being young and pursuing this profession has its own hazards  as with age the dancer also grows their personality and being a spectacle  sport of sorts, dance does attract quite a crowd  which  may have little to do with the dance but a lot to do with the dancer.  Besides like any other competitive high profile sport, this field is also full of people who constantly sharpen their knives and come to you  with full gusto if you make even one slip.
Such dangerous  walking on the blade's edge makes dancing even more enchanting  and fruitful for the professional dancer.
Then the issue of  finding the right gurus as the crowd that teaches youngsters is pretty different from the ones who deal with children. As you graduate from being a child to a  strapping young lady or gent, there is the possibility of not finding a strong Guru  is very high. Most gurus at this level are busy professionals having their own academies and are not in a position to spend much time other than including the  talented youngsters as one of the  few backstage artistes.  This is the major pitfall of being with an accomplished dancer but there is no choice here either.
The other issue is emotional  which means, a teeanger is already tottering on the edges of a highly  stressful  growing up blues  and he or she has now deal with a bunch of strangers they would rather avoid.  The  practice sessions are usually late evening the time that whey would rather hangout with friends  and it may even go up to late in the night killing the precious extra hours the teenagers would like to curl up in the bed.
Besides, such pressures, the school or  college would also have their own set of traps to spring for the youngsters as their academic performance is equally essential  for their existence in a family fold.
Go through all this as the  end result is truly well worth striving for!

Immortal Art

It is a long time since I came back to my blog! There were three triggers why I am back here! One was an invitation to visit an art exhibition of a parent of a danseuse I admire a lot about whom I would write last today! There were merely two pictures of this artist Kuber Dutt in whose memory his daughter and family had put up the art show. The pictures spoke volumes about the man and his life as splendid as resplendent it should have been as his art. But such  geniuses rarely stay for long lest they get sullied by the ways of the world. Purva had asked me to come to the exhibition but there were many other worldly things I was caught up  which prevented me from going to this exhibition which is going to be a great regret for life because I had to decline something that was offered out of love  for something that was created out of love and immortalised  for the world.   I will try and make amends for it soon. 

The second trigger for the writing is owing to another great miss this week of an extraordinary performance by one of the most admired male exponents of  classical dance who refused to go out of line of the tradition and who is upholding the rigour and grammer of dance, Vasudevan.  This one artist I would  want to watch with my heart's content one of these days with Smitha, my partner in life who herself is a dancer of some standing from the past.  Vasudevan I am told  brings the subtlety of dance with the strength firmness of the male footwork which should be enthralling experience for sure! 

Third and final trigger is of course the beautiful Purva  who has captured the imagination of many by her seemingly endless repertoire  of expressions and powerful performance where she becomes one with the character she is personifying.  Dance, unlike even stage  drama, makes the artist change personalities and moods in a  moment's notice where the former allows the actor to live the role to its full. Not for the stage actor to change the role from balarama to parasurama, not for him to change from parasakti to a poor mendicant all  within the space of flicker of an eye in a dance drama. The expressions of the face and the hand moments  of a solo dancer have to spontaneous so as to tell the story and not allow the spectator to wonder whether it is the same person performing the next scene.  The whirlwind of moods, the tapping of the feet,   the undulating pitch of the lilting music, bright costumes  and of course the seamless choreography should transport the audience from their seats to the palaces of dwaraka, the jungles of Mathura, the lofty mountains of  Kailash, the idyllic lakes of mansaraovr, the bustling ghats of  kasi and of course the pains and pleasures of the divine mother.  Has Purva done all of this, only her friends and her audience could tell, I was part of the audience just once. But I can see from the repertoire of pictures that keeps streaming out and screaming her talent, she definitely is already firmly on the path to glory which her father set out to traverse long ago and seemingly now continuing through her! 

Nagumomu in dance!
Of the many Thiagaraja Keerthanas "nagumomu kanalene " in Abheri ragam is an all time hit with all leading singers from semmangudi Sreenivasa Iyer, M. S Subbulakshmi, Balamuralikrishna, Sudha Ragunathan to countless others. It is also a favourite for the instrumentalists too! But rendering the song in dance is truly a divine experience as done by Nirupama Rajendra who seemed to have a 15 minute delightful video posted three years earlier. See Nirupama Rajendra rendering solo  Nagumomu

Nirupama and Rajendra, a dynamic and spellbinding dancing couple from Bangalore-India have over the years created a wave of excitement on the Indian dance scene. With their own worldwide successful company - ‘Abhinava Dance Company’ firmly established as one of India’s most popular and cutting-edge, the duo have been credited with injecting a great deal of innovation, creativity, enthusiasm and imagination to Classical dance. 

Dances and Danseuse

How difficult is it to learn Dance? If you go by the popularity of arangetram focused learning of dance then there  it should be a breeze, but if you go by what the puritans do or at least attempt to do, then it is a herculean task requiring tremendous patience, huge amount of  hard work, perseverance, sometimes absolute thick skin to take in the insults  and the taunts of the contemporary and the established people of your order, besides loads of money as dance teachers dont come cheap these days.  Is it worth the effort? well ask those who have done it and who are doing it the serous way. I  have the fortune of knowing a few  and know how difficult and nerve racking it is to be a Bhrathanatyam artist in  an increasingly crassly commercial world where  an arangetram  could put you behind a few lakhs  and leave you with even lesser friends!
This breathless youngster whom I met in a business school global conference where I had to speak  belonged to the second category, who won her laurels with spunk and plenty of work which showed when she made  her appearance on stage at the culturals at this college from where she passed out couple of years ago. The visiting alumni  is a Vidhushi and her name  is Vidhushi

Dancing legs dont stop!
Except that they would make others tap to  the rhythm honed out of years of practice and performance on stage. One finds that there is a definite revival of this artform  worldwide thanks to the amazing work being done by senior artistes without exception. Suchitra, a Kalashetra artiste, today a mother of two and in her early forties could not wait to get back to  dancing, except that she chose to be a dance teacher rather than push herself to the fore. Dance is an art that should be practiced on stage by  young women and men when their bodies are supple and movements are fluid. Asking your limps to move and trying to present yourself as an alluring  Bhama or Rukmani when you are in the wrong side of forties can be quite tiring for the audience, however much you could be accomplished as a  dancer, a mistake many an ambitious artist make much to the discomfort of the audience!

Here is an interesting website   http://www.cyberkerala.com/bharatanatyam/ which has a lot of information and data on dancers in chronological order. About 22 artists have been listed with a request for more people who could be enlisted at this site provided they send in their resume with three photographs. A good effort but expecting people who are busy pursuing their vocations to get enlisted in any website is a tall order. We wish the website the best.  What I liked also that they have linked as external links  the following artists, some of whom are well known names  on the basis that they have a website of their own.
1. Rema Shrikant
2. Vasumathi Badrinathan
3. Shobana
4. Febina Mathew
5. K.Mohanan & Sunitha Mohanan
6. Medha Hari
7. Radha Dutta
8. Anupa Thakurta
9. Aline Civinelli
10.Rani
11.Gayatri Subramanian
12.Parvathy Raghunath
13.Anjali Nandan
14.Pranita Jain
Once again I must come back to ICCR  which has not done this sort of work where irrespective of their standing in the dance profession, every single performer of value should find their names and links in the ICCR database, which is no big job for this government organisation.