Bharatanatyam diva Rama Vaidyanathan is preparing to carry India’s mythical love stories to American shores. Later this year, she will be taking her choreographic presentation ‘New Dimensions to the Margam’, held first at the Madhavi Festival on April 21 in Delhi, to US audiences. Vaidyanathan’s enactment of the Krishna’s palki yatra has at its core stillness and control.
As Shiva’s cosmic dance thunders in its terrible beauty, her feet keep pace with the reverberating beats of the mridangam and kanjira. Art romancing god is a primeval trope; Vaidyanathan’s love for Bharatanatyam is like the “deep connection you have for your beloved”. Two compositions stand out during the performance. In the piece where the nayika entreats her lover to leave as it is getting late, Vaidyanathan uses abhinaya with subtle movements—pleading one moment, showing mock anger the next, as she speaks with her eyes and expresses tenderness in a beguiling smile.
Like many of her contemporaries in Indian classical dance, she tweaks the vocabulary, poetry and traditional treatment of the compositions to create innovations that challenge the grammar of Bharatnatyam: for example, one of the pieces is performed to Rabindra sangeet. An abhang—a Marathi religious folk song dedicated to the Lord Vithala—is performed by Vaidyanathan’s four students Kavya Ganesh, Reshika Sivakumar, Shubhamani Chandrashekar and Vaishnavi Dhore, depicting warkaris (travelling pilgrims) walking the Pandharpur trail.
A couple of decades ago, an abhang would be heresy if included in Bharatnatyam. But in 2011, Vaidyanathan’s breakout choreography ‘Mad and Divine’ based on the life of abhang practitioner Janabai and the Kashmiri mystic Lal Ded was critically acclaimed; the experiments continue to date. “When
I started innovating, I faced criticism. But it was what I was meant to do,” explains the artiste. Vaidyanathan’s mother Madhavi was the force behind her artistic progression and the Madhavi festival is
a tribute to her passion for dance.
One of the directors of the Delhi-based Ganesha Natyalaya, Vaidyanathan rues the fact that today’s generation is into “two minutes of fame”. “I see youngsters putting up short videos of their dance and amassing social media following. But what matters is whether you can sustain your craft before a live audience. Connecting to the audience is an art that comes from patience. One cannot fast forward on sadhana,” She should know. She started dancing when she was just six and at 55 is still learning and loving it.