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Wonders of Life

Wonders of Life Recently, I heard a story. Kids in a class were asked to write wonders in their life. Everyone wrote different things. Some wrote about parents, friends and so on. One particular girl wrote that the wonders in her life are that she can see, hear, walk, talk, also can experience nature and arts. I was really moved by this story. What is really important in life? Experience! While I was learning classical dance, I always used to have a question. How do you show spontaneity in dance? If I am rehearsing 6-7 hours a day, won't it be too technical when I actually perform it? How can one go to fetch water every single day with same enthusiasm? Teachers used to tell us to imagine our own life experiences similar to the situation in dance. Agreed, but what if we have never experienced this? My mentor and me decided to find answers. If a situation demands for romantic expression, try to remember your first crush. Try to remember the exact situation. The plac...
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Language of Dance

Dance speaks through movements, gestures, postures and expressions. The dancer's body transforms into a moving sculpture which tells us the stories of the world. It takes us on a journey of characters, incidents and places. This process took ages to develop and now this is the most amazing feature of dance. It has added costumes, make up, setting of stage and lighting to make its own dictionary. In this process, Indian classical dances have gone through a tremendous change and it is still evolving. Indian classical dance, in it's ancient form, follows scriptures for the reference. The greatest and most followed is Natyashastra which almost works as a dictionary for dancers. It describes hand gestures (hastas), postures (standing, sitting positions, movements, etc), facial expressions and has references about costume, setting the stage and also the positions of characters on stage. Mostly, the dancer develops a piece of dance from the very basic word to word meaning to t...
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In Search of a Movement

Yes! You read it right! The dancer knows number of movements of his/her style. The training and rehearsals have given him/her a knowledge and sense of beauty, appropriateness and sense to follow the flow of music. Yet, every dancer is constantly searching for a perfect point of movement. This is perhaps because of that human instinct which looks for a perfect bliss. In a performance, there is one moment which gives this bliss to the dancer as well as the audience. So, both of them are on the same journey to search this perfect point. This journey starts from the point when the dancer starts choreographing it. The composition should be felt, one should get involved into it and compose a set of appropriate movements. Now this is a real difficult task. Because, one has to pay attention whether the movement fits to the rhythm, flow, emotion, at the same time it should look graceful, should maintain fluidity and the dancer should be comfortable with it. If a choreographer is differe...
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Koravanji Nritya

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