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  02 TRADE & ECONOMY
   
   
  03 INVESTMENT UPDATE
   
   
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  06 CULTURE
   
   
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  08 CALENDAR
   

   
  HIGHLIGHTS
   
 

Minister Kamal Nath says Trade Inequalities Unacceptable
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  Bharatanatyam
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  Tamil Nadu: Your Gateway to South India
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  06. CULTURE
 
  Bharatanatyam
   
 

Bharatanatyam was a dance technique evolved in the South of India in Tamil Nadu and practised in the Shiva temples. It is a highly specialised science with uses a traditional background and rigid codes and conventions. Bharatanatyam skillfully embodies the three primary aspects of dance. They are bhava or mood, raga or music and melody and tala or timing. The technique of Bharatanatyam consists of the hand, foot, face and body movements, which are performed to the accompaniment of 64 principles of coordination.
 
 


For many centuries only certain families in the district of Thanjavur performed Bharatanatyam. The inheritors of the craft were known as Nattuvans. The chief exponents of this dance were the devadasis or temple dancers. They would perform the dance daily at the time of worship or on festive occasions.

It came to be patronized by the rajahs

 

and princes. In course of time the devadasis began to dance in the courts and palaces and the sanctity of the dance was lost.Bharatanatyam stands in the forefront of all the classical dance art forms that are now prevalent in India. Owing to its religious origins and its highly developed technique, it is the form of dance most akin to the code compiled by the sage Bharata Muni in


  his famous Natya Shastra. The modern form of Bharatanatyam presentation is the arrangements of four Nattuvans of Pandanallur who were brothers. They were Ponniah, Chinniah, Vadivelu and Sivanandam, who lived in the eighteenth century.

The Vidwan, Meenaskshi Sundaram Pillai of Pandanallur, the greatest teacher of Bharatanatyam is a direct descendant of these brothers.

It was Rukmini Devi Arundale, the celebrated dancer and scholar who took this dance form out of the temple and gave it new respectability. She started the dance school Kalakshetra in Adyar. The school was later shifted to Thiruvanmiyur, from where it now functions. Here the old, gurukulam system in education is still followed and many classes are conducted in sylvan surroundings.

In the Nataraja temple or the temple of dancing Shiva at Chidambaram, the 108 poses of the classical form of Bharatanatyam are sculpted on the pillars around the shrines and on the gateways.
 


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