My endeavour is to present Bharatanatyam as secular art-form accessible to everyone. To break the perception of Bharatanatyam as a religious art built to preserve religion, prevent it being relegated to the corner of cultural heritage or ethnic or oriental representative art form. I wish to present it as an art form of the present, of today - that stands as a product shaped by its cultural and ethnic history, yet absolutely not limited by it.
My work includes content from traditional repertoire and content from secular Indian literature spanning the ancient upto the modern. My effort is to present an original perspective of existing dance repertoire, while exploring a fuller scope of the art form by absorbing into the repertoire themes and ideas that interest me which include humanity – the emotional and transactional behaviour – and a look at the Universe and all its elements through a scientific lens.
Owing to its unbroken (although nebulous) history, Bharatanatyam tends to be identified as an ethnic art form. Therefore, it is natural to ask of it questions of relevance, that go beyond a preservational motivation. How is it relevant as a mode of expression to the next generation that does not live lives that are similar to what was lived 50 years back even in India.
Be it as a performer, or a teacher, I find it not only relevant but also a celebration of human voices over the ages to transfer the knowledge of this artform, along with form AND content. To me its not about personal stories, or about religion, or about even ethnicity. I look at it as timeless human stories of love, labour and war, which are universally human. This approach allows me to form that bridge with audiences worldwide, and more significantly with young people who are at the cusp of a serious engagement with this art form.
Art is successful only when the artist is able to abstract the essence of a thing, or a character, or a scene and present to you that abstraction – so one is not describing it, but being it. The task of portraying gender based themes through a performing art, especially so dance, cries out foremost for an intimate understanding of what is ‘maleness’ and what is ‘femaleness’. Can a certain set of characteristics – physical, emotional or psychological - be attributed to being male or female?
While traditional repertoire in Bharatanāṭyam itself has a wide variety of characters and voices of men and women available to be portrayed. I am personally excited by the possibility of exploring a finer understanding of gender, not in a purely academic and cerebral way, but also through the very body (which gives rise to the identity debate in the first place) and through a form like Bharatanatyam, which to me is an inherently gender neutral movement vocabulary.
The title of this page is inspired by Devdutt Pattanaik's book which adresses dignity in queer themes. At the same time it reflects my idea of the spiritual from within the secular
