Finding Myself Between the ‘Classical’ and ‘Popular’ Aesthetic in Bharatanatyam Dance
NDEO’s Guest Blog Series features posts written by our members about their experiences in the fields of dance and dance education. We continue this series with a post by Deepa Mahadevan, Found/Director, Matrusena. Guest posts reflect the experiences, opinions, and viewpoints of the author and are printed here with their permission. NDEO does not endorse any business, product, or service mentioned in guest blog posts. If you are interested in learning more about the guest blogger program or submitting an article for consideration, please click here.
When the lights came on we were five Bharatanatyam dancers posing as live sculptures and hoping to recreate in the minds of the audience a snapshot of an evergreen film song, “Mannavan Vandhaan Adi” from the movie, ‘Tiruvarulchelvar’ (1967). The impetus for this blog is the affect or the unformed tension that took place in my mind-body as a Bharatanatyam dancer when negotiating my conservative classical aesthetic biases while giving form to this musical composition from the popular space of Tamil cinema.
My research traces the shift in the aesthetic orientation of Bharatanatyam from the 1930s to 2020s studying it through three time periods that I identify. One of the most important means through which Bharatanatyam dance reached the middle class in the early twentieth century was through the movies. The period from the 1930s to 1950s, in the movies, was driven by nationalistic sentiments as India was marching towards independence. However, by the early 1960s the appeal of the dances in the movies moved from invoking national sentiment and ideal womanhood to glamorizing the heroine or the dancer1. This was also the time when many dance teachers from the hereditary families of dance practitioners who used to work as choreographers in the movies gradually moved away from the movies to set up dance schools outside among the urban middle class. At this time, the dance choreography, the lyrics and sartorial choices were focused on glamorizing the heroine to further the popular sentiment of the times. This period from the late fifties through the sixties marked the total departure for Bharatanatyam from the popular aesthetic of the movies to the classical aesthetic that started taking shape outside of Tamil cinema and gaining importance among the urban middle class.
This song that we had prepared for the audience was a very popular film song that was repeatedly screened on the local television channels in Tamil Nadu, India, when I was growing up there in the 80s and 90s. It was an old film melody2. It featured the dancing queen and the ravishing super star of that time, Padmini3, dancing, preening, batting her eyelids and gesturing and flirting with the King Raja Raja Cholan, played by popular actor, Sivaji Ganesan. She sings his praise and is asking for his attention and grace. She dances in an ornate circular, raised hall holding sculpturesque poses, leaning and posing against structures that outline the curves of her body. She goes through several wardrobe changes through the song, which is a typical feature among most Indian movies4. Padmini’s dresses are mostly a highly decorative bodice sporting her seemingly bare midriff and a tight, equally elaborately decorated pant with a center fan-like attachment that hangs down between her legs5. The pants hug her frame. The bottom part of her costume and the fan-like attachment closely resemble the typical costume worn by Bharatanatyam dancers outside cinema where the classical aesthetic was taking shape among the urban middle class6. The sartorial choice might have been an attempt to yolk the worlds of classical and popular together but the sensuality of Padmini’s costume celebrated female sexuality and was a jarring mismatch to the classical aesthetic, which was focused on foregrounding spirituality as the essence of Bharatanatyam7.
Coming back to the event that day . It was convened to celebrate the life and poetic achievements of a prolific Tamil poet, Kannadasan (1927-81), who was a famous lyricist and poet in Indian cinema between 1952 and 1981. The audience that day were Tamil speaking and like us, dancers, identified with the popularity of these musical numbers that invoked their shared cultural memory of this popular aesthetic.8 However for me and my partner of over 30 years, sitting in the audience, it was a seminal moment as in my 30 years of being a professional performer I have never danced to a cinema song and my husband had never seen me on stage moving to film music. At the end of the program, he said he was very uncomfortable watching me dance to that number and felt it did not befit my stature as a dance researcher, scholar, instructor and practitioner of many years. His candid feedback helped me understand and analyze the reason for my own discomfort in presenting this piece.
We chose to present songs of the poet, Kannadasan, from the late 1960s9 as they seemed to be more sensational than the earlier times. We imagined that these would be more popular with the audience present that day. As Bharatanatyam dancers, all the five of us had between 15 to 30 years of training in the classical Bharatanatyam aesthetic. We created dances for these film numbers with our bodies trained in the classical aesthetic of Bharatanatyam.
However, the relative lightness of the music, compared to the heavier tones of the classical aesthetic and more importantly the light-hearted nostalgia that these popular songs created in our bodies and mind prompted us to create movements and choreography for these numbers that were relatively light-footed, more flowy and had an overall appeal that resonated more with the sentiment of the popular aesthetic than the classical aesthetic. To be specific, I was not very keen on sitting in the deep Araimandi or out-turned knee position that was the bedrock for any classical Bharatanatyam performance. I moved away from having movements that were grounded and used poses or stances that seemed more interesting and was able to recreate the affect of the popular aesthetic. We also used at certain points of the song a little more jutting of the hip than I would have if I were dancing a classical dance number in a mainstream venue. As for me, I unabashedly brought the teasing looks of the heroine in my eyes more than I would have done if I were portraying a flirty heroine in a dance number within the classical repertoire of Bharatanatyam. I reflect that, for me, I drew from the sensuality of actress/dancer Padmini to inspire my creative movement and choice of facial expressions.
The classical aesthetic amplifies the theoretical and technical rigor of the dance. The classical aesthetic systematically mutes female sexuality. This was a move by the English-educated anti colonial nationalists in the early twentieth century to remove the stigma created around the dancer and the dance form10. Thus teachers often groom their students to mute the sexuality in service of the spiritual essence of the dance. For the purpose of the event honoring Kannadasan it was our choice to present popular pieces from Tamil cinema. Our positioning in the society as classical dancers and our choice of dress, which was neither revealing nor flashy aided us to keep up our respected image as classical dancers though we were dancing to popular numbers from Tamil cinema. But, both during the preparation and presentation at this event I was also able to notice my visceral artistic discomfort stemming from my aesthetic biases. For me, this artistic assignment was a personal experiment to challenge my artistic biases. I did imagine my teacher, mother, father and peers in my field were present, frowning over my choices. I am pretty sure I would have hesitated much more to dance these pieces in India, especially in Chennai, which is still considered the classical hub of Bharatanatyam - unless I present it as a dance-research experiment and in which case the academic framing would serve to reinstate the respectability of the performance. Right after this event, I performance in the dance festival in Chennai, India. I presented pieces that were far removed from the popular rhetoric. My experiments with the popular aesthetic has to wait for a different time and place11.
Interested in learning more? Check out NDEO's upcoming OPDI course 'Dance in India-Delectable Diversity, Taste of Technique.' Learn more here!
Dr. Deepa Mahadevan is the founder, artistic director and resident choreographer of Tiruchitrambalam school of dance (Estd. 2004- present) where she teaches Bharatanatyam dance and critical dance theory. She is the founder of ‘Matrusena’ a non-profit art organization invested in opening up the practice of Bharatanatyam to a radical epistemology that addresses gender, caste, class, sex, religion and ableism in the Bharatanatyam field. Dr. Mahadevan's research traces the history of rupture, loss and reconstruction of Bharatanatyam dance aesthetics and its transmission in the wake of nationalism, globalization and neoliberalism from early twentieth century to present times. She especially examines the role of caste, class, sexuality, gender and religion in the practice and transmission of dance.
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1 See my paper ‘When Bharatanatyam moved from the popular to the classical’ to understand the socio-political context that triggered this shift of Bharatanatyam from the movies to the urban middle class space outside cinema.
2 Here I say ‘old’ because my memories of watching these actors on screen are from the 1990s and this film released in1967 was of an earlier generation to mine. One of the most popular programs by the regional television network of the national television, ‘Doordarshan’ was ‘Oliyum Oliyum’ that aired every friday at 8pm IST. A loose English translation of the program tile would mean ‘Light and Sound’. This was aired every friday evening and was a good program to set off the weekend programming. This program featured popular music numbers from movies and this song was aired often under this program.
3 Padmini was one of the elite stars of that time who was able to embrace both the classical aesthetic outside cinema in the middle class mainstream where Bharatatnatyam dance established its performer and audience base and the popular aesthetic in the movies at the same time.
4 Most Indian movies feature six to eight songs and are largely musicals.
5 Apart from the pant and the fan like attachment which are very typical of Bharatanatyam costumes outside the cinema world, the rest of Padmini’s costume like her hairdo and jewelry is a far cry from what is worn by dancers in the classical space of Bharatanatyam outside the movies.Padmini’s hair was not braided or tied into a neat bun, which was a typical hairdo of Bharatanatyam dancers outside cinema. Her hair was also elaborately decorated with glittering ornaments that dazzled as she moved.
6 Most hereditary practitioners started their careers by being choreographers and dancers in Tamil cinema mostly in the 1940s. However by the late 1950s they moved out of being choreographers in Tamil cinema to establish dance schools among the urban middle class where Bharatanatyam saw its permanent home.
7 Much has been written about the spiritual framing of Bharatanatyam see ‘Bharatanatyam, A Reader’ by Davesh Soneji.
8 All in our team of five dancers were excited by the popularity of these numbers as we all grew up between the 80s and 90s when these numbers popular among the public. One of our dancers was a 20-year old who was born and brought up here in the United States and admitted that she did not identify with our enthusiasm or shared cultural memory.
9 Kannadasan as a poet was himself more popular only after 1950s in the movies. In the late sixties and seventies there was quite an exchange of tunes and aesthetics between north and south India. This could have contributed to the songs being more sensational at this time than earlier times. Also, alll five dancers except one who was in her twenties and who was born and brought up in India were able to dial into the emotional sentiment of this popular song from Tamil cinema.
10 See ‘Bharatanatyam, A Reader’ by Davesh Soneji to understand more about this stigma on hereditary dancers and their dances that exacerbated between the late nineteenth and early twentieth century in the light of the non-conjugal lifestyles of the hereditary practitioners.
11 I am working on a longer paper where I discuss and present the different ways in which dance practitioners since the 1990s have continued to work with the popular aesthetic while being classical Bharatanatyam dancers in order to monetarily survive in a competitive dance field.
Photo credits (in order from top to bottom): Sharon Freer, Santoshkumar, Swagato Bannerjee, and Jeyakumar Sathyamoorthy