Bharata Natyam

The compelling story of a beautiful and versatile South Indian dance form

The considerable interest currently being expressed in women and religion has thrown down an important challenge; the need to see women not merely as the passive victims of an oppressive ideology but also perhaps primarily as the active agents of their own positive constructs. This book therefore aims to fill a notable gap in the literature. Twelve contributors study the role of women in Hindu religion by examining textual studies of the part played by women in a variety of religion rituals, both past and present, by exploring the socio-religious context of their various communites; and by using specialist material to draw on cross-cultural conclusions.

Brenda McCutchen provides an integrated approach to dance education, using four cornerstones: dancing and performing, creating and composing, historical and cultural inquiry and analysing and critiquing. She also illustrates the main developmental aspects of dance.

Bharata Natyam is currently one of the most popular styles of classical dance in India. It is also well known world-wide. Certain components of this dance have historical associations with religious ritual in the temples of south India. In the course of its transition from performance in temples and courts to the concert stage, the making of modern Bharata Natyam has passed from the purview of traditional/hereditary families, and dancers into the hands of the educated elite. What changes have been brought about in presentation and style as a result of this transition? Although current dancers and teachers make claims for the antiquity of their art, and the authenticity of the tradition, what was the dance of the hereditary practitioners, the devadasis, really like? How much of current practice is an invention of the past fifty years? These and other questions on the fascinating history of the creation of Bharata Natyam are dealt with by Anne-Marie Gaston who provides extensive oral testimony of current perceptions and directions of Bharata Natyam. This illuminating account of how both hereditary and non-hereditary dancers, teachers and critics view the evolution of Bharata Natyam provides a critique of the place of Bharata Natyam in Indian society and of the concept of traditional' in late twentieth-century India.

Dancing Bodies of Devotion: Fluid Gestures in Bharata Natyam examines how Bharata Natyam, a traditionally Hindu storytelling dance form, moves across religious boundaries through both incorporating choreography on Buddhist, Christian, Muslim, and Jain themes and the pluralistic identities of participants. Dancers traverse religious boundaries by reformulating an aesthetic foundation based on performative rather than solely textual understandings of rasa, conventionally defined as a formula for how to physically craft emotion on stage. Through the ethnographic case studies of this volume, dancers of Bharata Natyam innovatively demonstrate how the rasa of devotion (bhakti rasa), surprisingly absent from classic dance-related texts, serves as the pivotal framework for expanding on their own interreligious thematic and interpretive possibilities. In contemporary Bharata Natyam, bhakti rasa is not just about enhancing religious experience; instead, these dancers choreographically adapt various religious identities and ideas in order to emphasize pluralistic cultural and ethical dimensions in their work. Through the dancing body, multiple religious and secular interpretations fluidly co-exist.

Bharatanatyam, an Indian classical dance form; a study.

Derived from the Latin verb “gerere”-to carry, act, or do-“gesture” has accrued critical currency but has remained undertheorized. Migrations of Gesture addresses this absence and provides a complex theory on the value of gesture for understanding human sign production. Gestures migrate from body to body, from one medium to another, and between cultural contexts. Juxtaposing distinct approaches to gesture in order to explore the ways in which they at once shape and are influenced by culture, the contributors examine the works of writers Henri Michaux and Stphane Mallarm, photographers Henri Cartier-Bresson and Robert Frank, and filmmakers Hou Hsiao-Hsien and Martin Arnold, along with cultural practices such as gang walking, ballet, and classical Indian dance. The authors move deftly between an organic, phenomenal appreciation of human expression and a historicist, semiotic understanding of how the “human” is itself created through gestural routines. Contributors: Mark Franko, U of California, Santa Cruz; Ketu H. Katrak, U of California, Irvine; Akira Mizuta Lippit, U of Southern California; Susan A. Phillips, Pitzer College; Deidre Sklar; Lesley Stern, U of California, San Diego; Blake Stimson, U of California, Davis. Carrie Noland is associate professor of French literature and critical theory at the University of California, Irvine. Sally Ann Ness is professor of anthropology at University of California, Riverside.

Court dance in Java has changed from a colonial ceremonial tradition into a national artistic classicism. Central to this general transformation has been dance's role in personal transformation, developing appropriate forms of everyday behaviour and strengthening the powers of persuasion that come from the skillful manipulation of both physical and verbal forms of politeness. This account of dance's significance in performance and in everyday life draws on extensive research, including dance training in Java, and builds on how practitioners interpret and explain the repertoire. The Javanese case is contextualized in relation to social values, religion, philosophy, and commoditization arising from tourism. It also raises fundamental questions about the theorization of culture, society and the body during a period of radical change.