CHENNAI: Anugraha Sridhar’s association with the Rotary Club of Chennai Thiruvanmiyur goes a long way. Her parents were Rotarians, she was an Anette, and has also been part of their Interact Club. Though she disassociated herself from the club years ago, life came full circle when she was bestowed the Vocational Excellence Award in the field of Bharatanatyam for 2023 from the same club.
The dancer and musician currently resides in New York, where she gets to present the Indian classical dance form, especially her style of dance, to a non-Indian, immigrant audience. A practising Bharata Nrityam artiste, Anugraha has collaborated with dance groups like Jeeva Dance Academy with Sonali Skandan at Navatman, a prominent dance company in New York, and Ganesh Vasudeva, a dancer from the West coast.
Making Bharatanatyam global
A disciple of veteran dancer Padma Subrahmanyam, Anugraha wishes to make her style of dance prominent in the US. In this style, along with the regular adavu and margam performance, there are a lot of movements derived from Padma’s research of the Natya Shastra. “She has derived 108 movements that use a specific vocabulary as prescribed by the Natya Shastra.
From the movement of the hand to the leg to the entire body, the way to reconstruct that movement has been prescribed and she used temple sculptures as visual guidelines to put these movements together. There are combinations of the various techniques of the foot, hand and body. These, when incorporated while doing the other parts of the Bharatanatyam, add a lot of grace and finesse,” she explains.
Among her favourite performances is the solo she has presented in 2022 at Capitol Hill in Washington DC as part of the Azadi ka Amrit Mahotsav celebrations. “A group of 75 business organisations all over the US came together and invited all the top US senators, the Indian ambassador to the US and Prime Minister Narendra Modi addressed the gathering via Zoom. I was able to take a little bit of our South Indian culture there and present small pieces of my choreography. To be able to perform at the seat of law was a momentous occasion,” she shares.
Communicating through dance
Performing in New York and other cities in the US for about two years now, Anugraha observes, “(I have to) make sure the vocabulary is relatable or give them a synopsis and help them understand the premise and the idea of the story I am trying to communicate. It’s just a language that you use to tell a story, and communicate an idea and every performance should be about that.
There is no takeaway from a performance if an idea has not been communicated. So for me, that’s the challenge. But there is also great scope to pick up socially relevant topics. Once in New York, I was part of an ensemble that presented climate change and how the human hand has caused destruction. Ideas like that are extremely relatable and you can use the Bharatanatyam language to express that too,” she shares.
An artiste grows
In a city that is used to Broadway and Ballet, Bharatanatyam too finds acceptance, she says. “I see a lot of young audience flocking to performances, whether it is Indian dance or not. Other than that I see a lot of young Indian immigrant parents, who want their children to learn it,” she says. But acceptance does become harder while presenting more traditional pieces where she has to take them back to the era in which it was composed. Anugraha has evolved as an artiste in her 22 years as a performer.
“When I started, it was a lot of just digesting things that I saw around me. I watched a lot of my guru’s style. I was asked to see good dancers and art that I was able to appreciate. I think I have reached a point where I have picked up so many influences from around me and I can think about having a unique creative voice of my own,” she signs off.