Indian dancing

INDIAN DANCING

adapt modern stage lighting to suit their art. Footlights, strip, and border lights ate used, as in the West. Despite all this, however, lighting still plays a poor role in dance performances, except in the presentations of a few of our leading dancers.

Lighting is one of the most effective aids to illusion. It can make ot mart the spectacle of the dance. While flat lighting helps certain numbers, such as the Alarippu in Bharata Natyam, it tends to create monotony and should therefore be sparingly used. Lighting from different angles enhances the effect of a number immeasurably, so long as cate is taken to avoid ugly shadows on the backdrop.

Arc lights covered with mica help considerably in heightening the illusory effect if the mica is of a shade that fits in with the ensemble. Mixed white and colouted lights, provided they harmonize, help to produce gradations and combinations of colours that evoke a vatiety of moods. A spotlight playing on a darkened stage is useful for Indian dances of a light nature not characterized by any technique in particular.

The lighting expert must use his lights with the same loving care and skill as a painter uses his colours. The set designer and the lighting expert must, between them, create a magic world, an atmosphere that will help the audience to achieve the rasa-consciousness which the dancer tries to evoke in them.

The trend in modern times is towards realism in décor. This, of coutse, is not out of place for topical themes such as the LabourCapital struggle, or the Labour-versus-Machinery ballet made famous by Uday Shankar. Even hete there must be some illusion. Dancing — particularly Indian dancing — being mainly symbolic, calls for far more illusion than drama or the opera, whete speech and song tell the story. The dancer, being mute, must create with his gesture language a world of illusion, and in this he has the aid of the set designer, the lighting expert, and the musicians, whose atts must harmonize.

MAKE-UP AND ORNAMENTATION: Other aids to illusion are make-up and ornamentation, both of which play an active part in

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