BENGALURU: Ask a dancer the one thing they miss during this lockdown and a unanimous response is, ‘The stage’. For this year’s International Dance Day, that’s being observed on Wednesday, artistes are adopting virtual means, bringing forth a new stage to showcase their skills and spread knowledge about their art form.
Making its debut on the ‘digital stage,’ Nupura School of Bharathanatyam, an institute that has been running in the city for over 40 years, is doing an online show on April 29. Manu Srinivasan, the curator of the show, titled Sakhya, says, “We are living in uncertain times, where we need to adapt and move forward. Our experiment with the virtual platform is also to reach out to a global audience. This year, UNESCO has announced the theme, ‘Purpose of dance’, and the show will focus on that.”
The two-hour event, which is scheduled to star at 7pm on their Instagram page, @nityanritya, will have dancers based in India, USA and Canada, performing to Mysore-style Bharathanatyam choreography by Dr Lalitha Srinivasan, the director of the school. While dancers say virtual medium may pale in comparison to the physical stage, it’s a platform they are ready to explore. For Ashwin Kumar, dancer and choreographer at Nrityarutya, a city-based contemporary dance trust, going online seems to be the only way for artistes to meet their creative needs.
“I miss the grandeur of a stage. It is sad that we can’t have that online, but you can’t really complain about it either because this is the only way I can discuss choreography, ideate and teach my students,” says Kumar, who is taking online classes on Zoom. For the International Dance Day, Nrityarutya is coming up with three workshops, scheduled from April 30 to May 6. Each of these is a two-day event, with the first two to be conducted by Ashwin while the last one will feature Mayuri Upadhya, the director of the dance trust.
What’s also prompting dancers to go online is the guru-shishya tradition, and the students’ eagerness to learn. Kathak dancer Archana Balakrishnan Earat says when the lockdown was announced, she and her students, like everybody else, were holed up at home, and the latter pushed her to continue teaching online. She had to overcome her inhibitions to take it up, and battled initial hiccups of network connectivity, time lag and space issues, even moving furniture to get enough space for dancing. “Thanks to my students, I will come out a more confident person by the end of this lockdown, and I am looking forward to meeting them in person,” says Earat, a catalog manager with a design cafe.
Agrees Richard Tholoor, who has conducted over 32 free online salsa and bachta classes and has students across the globe. He says, “Everyone is stuck indoors, and dance can be the only way to make them free and break the monotony,” says Tholoor, who is going to release dance routines videos on different genres for International Dance Day. The videos will be released at 6pm on Facebook.
(With inputs from Meghana Sastry)