‘‘People say I dance just like a Tamilian,” says Menaka P P Bora, a Bharatanatyam and Sattriya dancer from Assam, who recently performed at the Margazhi festival in Chennai, which celebrates the music and art forms of South India. She is the new young face of the dance discipline. Over the years, this exclusive festival has deconservatised itself, including other art forms from all over the country. This year, Menaka got recognition for her performance of ‘Sattriya Repertoire: Tradition and Beyond’ at the marquee event.
The dancer, who studied literature at Stella Maris in Chennai, has been appointed as an artist-in-residence at the University of Oxford and an Elected Fellow of Royal Asiatic Society. Menaka’s guru is her mother, Indira Bora—a disciple of Rukmini Arundale and the first woman to invade an exclusive domain of men, Sattriya, Assam’s newly recognised classical dance form.
Along with Indira, the efforts of her ethno-musicologist daughter, who was trained in Bharatanatyam by the famous Dhananjayans, made the Sangeet Natak Akademi recognise ‘Sattriya Nritya’ as another classical dance of India. The over-five-centuries-old Sattriya was a ritualistic dance perfomed by celibate monks in Buddhist monasteries. Menaka’s rendezvous with Chennai began at age nine, when she did her arangetram at the Rani Seethai Hall. Her emotional moment—being gifted one of Arundale’s saris.
UNEXPECTED SIDE
Menaka learned kalaripayattu, the Kerala martial art form, from the renowned dancer and choreographer Chandralekha