Indian dancing

INDIAN DANCING

dance att, which, since the days of the Greeks, has thrown off whatever traces of religion clung to it, and has come to be admired not so much for the emotion it arouses as for its beauty and purity of line.

Ballet is remarkable for its skilled footwork, its pirouettes and entrechats. It relies on broad gestures and a minimum of facial expressions; in fact, the latter are often entirely absent and the dancet’s face appears mote like that of an automaton or a mummy. In India, centuries of refinement and minute stylization have resulted in the dancer’s every gesture containing a wealth of meaning. The hands are eloquent and the face reflects a thousand fleeting emotions. This abhinaya, ot expression, while it colours every dance performance, also leaves toom for nrffa, or pute dance movement. The mime imparts life to the mechanics of the dance. It seldom does so in ballet. It is this lack of intense emotionalism that makes Western dancets often resemble puppets.

Technique is all very well—and none could be more stringent than that of Bharata Natyam or Kathakali; but the Western technique appeats, to some extent, to stifle the spirit which gives life to dancing, the result perhaps of a misconception of the ancient Greeks’ belief that ‘the most beautiful creation of a High God is the human body’, and therefore stresses form and motion above emotional content.

INNER AND OUTER CONSCIOUSNESS We have seen that the Natya Shastra lays great emphasis on the cteation of rasa, i.e. the emotional fervour that the artist must arouse in the spectator so as to enable him to become one with the spirit of the drama. This ‘singleness’ or ‘oneness’ is a prerequisite for the enjoyment of ratya. In Western ballet, however, no such demand is made on the artist or the audience. The dancer appeals primarily to the senses, while the spirit remains untouched. Thus, ‘technique, so necessary in the expression of any art, comes to the point of overdevelopment; being created for the betterment of expression, it over-leaps itself and stifles expression to its own glorification.”? 1 Arnold Haskell, Ba//et Panorama.

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