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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 the expression of complex emotion in a gradual process. This takes us, the spectators into a different world altogether, giving us the eternal bliss we long for.
But at the same time it establishes a basic requirement of knowledge of this 'dictionary' or the language for both the dancer and the spectator. So in modern times the dancers are trying to advance towards the elevation of this language to a level where it gets free from inhibitions of its own language. The dance is becoming more of a subtle  expression of the subject rather than being a translation of lyrics through hand gestures and plastic facial expressions. The credit goes to the dancers who, after receiving a hard core training of ancient style tried to modify the style preserving the  sublime essence of it. Although, it is interesting to know the original ancient language for a reference. It is like reading Shakespeare for a supreme bliss for its literary beauty even though we don't use that type of language anymore.  

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