CHENNAI: I didn’t choose dance, dance chose me,” asserts Madhurima Narla quite a few times during our conversation. Ahead of her performance on January 20 where she will showcase the navarasas of a mother’s love through goddess Parvathi, the Chennai-based Kuchipudi dancer talks to us about her comeback to dance and how a simple question makes her create an entire recital.
A disciple of famous Kuchipudi exponent Vempatti Chinna Sathyam, Madhurima started dancing following in the footsteps of her aththai (aunt), danseuse Prabha Ramesh. “I learnt Bharatnatyam initially. Then I was initiated into Kuchipudi and even as a young girl, I felt that it was my calling. Something about the dance form attracted me,” she shares.
She had to take a break from dance due to various reasons and lived in USA and Australia for a few years. But something changed in 2010. “I wanted to give more to the audience…so I reinvented myself and went back to basics. I re-learnt Kuchipudi by myself. At that time, Sathyapriya Ramani, another disciple of my guru, helped me,” she says.
Madhurima has performed with her gurus during the Margazhi season and the last time she performed a solo in Chennai was in 2009. While she performed once in December 2017 during the Margazhi season as a dedication to her guru, the other three this month are all thematic performances.
Now a teacher herself, Madhurima runs the Tanmaya Kuchipudi Dance Academy in Chennai and Hyderabad. “It is not just a matter of pride but a great responsibility because I believe a guru helps the shishya grow…not just in dance or academics but also in all aspects of life,” she avers.
Though she has learnt both dance forms, Madhurima looks at them equally. “It is like two different characters yet similar. Both have javalis and padams, but most are in Telugu. Kuchipudi has Tharanga which is not present in other forms,” she says adding anybody can learn to dance and in fact it should be mandatory. “Learning any form of art makes you better in everything — mentally and physically. Arts is the only field that stimulates both left and right sides of the brain.”
Madhurima says that there is awareness about Kuchipudi but parents want their child to perform on the stage by the second week of training. “It’s not so much in Chennai but in other cities I have noticed this. So to address that, in my school, we have formulated a course where students are taught everything from steps to make-up. Every four months, we make students present what they have learned and we record and report it too, so that they can learn from their mistakes.”
Thematic performances
“From the minute Bharata muni wrote Natya Shastra, it started evolving. Now that there’s YouTube, people have watched almost everything. We have two great epics but we look only at the stories there. There’s much more to it. For instance, just Darwin’s theory of evolution, Dasavatharam is also evolution from water to land to buddhi in a sense. It starts with Mathsya, then moves to Vamana (land) and then to Rama (buddhi). And in each period the dharma is different telling us that one rule will not suit all.”
As an actress
Madhurima has also acted in many films notable among them is Shatamanam Bhavathi, a Telugu film that won the National Award in 2017
Future project
She is working on a piece on Vande Mataram which will have Ambal as the main character. She has dissected the sentences of the national song in such a way that it represents the characteristics of the goddess
PhD studies
She is also pursuing PhD under Rani Sadasivamurthy at Rashtreeya Sanskrit Vidyapeeth, Tirupathi, on ‘Grammar in Dance’