'Natya’ should educate, elevate and enlighten as the body and mind move towards the divine unlike dance which is just body movements. Natya should move with the changing times and address relevant issues. All subjects can be conveyed through Natya, said Bharatanatyam exponent V P Dhananjayan.
He was speaking at the seminar on emerging trends in Bharatanatyam organised by the Department of Bharatanatyam at St Teresa’s College on Wednesday.
Change is required for survival and the ancient texts and gurus have emphasised on the need for change. Creativity leads to change and it is through art that culture evolves. Natya which once flourished in temples and on divine themes has become a medium for addressing social issues.
“I took up environment and pollution issues by performing to the lines of a contemporary Tamil poem by Sujatha Vijayaraghavan in which she says that Lord Neelakanta whose throat turned blue after consuming poison can become as blue as Lord Krishna if he visits the earth. It got a good response.” He had adapted Rudyard Kipling’s ‘Jungle Book’, Mary Magdalen and other political satires into dance forms. Change is imperative. Talking of change, he said his guru and founder of Kalakshetra Rukmini Devi
was instrumental in systematising bharatanatyam. She learnt natya in secrecy from nattuvanars as Brahmins never learnt natya in those days. Earlier, the form was divine and accompanied the ‘chinnamelam’ or music troupe comprising nadaswaram, mridangam and cymbals and young girls danced to its tunes. But gradually the kings wanted the dancers to perform in the ‘Rajya sadasu’ and since then the dance form suffered a dent in its name and status. It began to be called ‘dasiattam’ or ‘sadir’. But the Music Academy wanted to bring it back to its glory. E Krishna Iyer and Raghavan of the Academy and Rukmini Devi were instrumental in bringing it back to its due place.
Rukmini Devi did research with the help of Kattamani Muthuswamy Pillai and systematised the form by learning it and teaching it to her niece and only student at Kalakshetra founded in 1936. But Krishna Iyer named it Bharatanatyam. “Based on the 10 mandalams she serialised the adavus and we were the first batch to learn it. That was in 1950.” Different styles are followed in different regions. “There are only two styles-good and bad.”
Natya activates all the senses and so it is ‘sampoorna yoga’. Earlier, he inaugurated the MA Bharatanatyam course at the college. He said students should not merely aim for degrees but learn the salient features and layers of meaning embedded in the form and make it attractive. He blamed the media for polluting art environs and not giving it its due.
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