Bharatanatyam

And if you're a Carnatic music fan, then you don't come and watch the Hindustani classical music.

If you're a Kathak dancer, you don't come and watch, say, some other form of dance, Bharatanatyam or anything.

So it's very specific to what is on the stage.

You get that? So the performance arts are like this.

Yeah.

There is a whole other level, too, which is the competitive dance circuit, which means hundreds of teams are competitively dancing in sometimes various different styles, which is like Garba, Ras, Bharatanatyam, which is classical Indian dance, Hindi film dance.

in Hindi fusion, there's hip hop, break dancing, krumping, all combined into one.

really competitive.

So when you look at Paramatma, generally Paramatma is considered to be a male god and the Atma is the feminine searching for the unity of the male and the female.

So these erotic padams which were danced a lot by Bharatanatyam dancers, sung by a lot of musicians and also performed a lot by the Kuchipudi dancers, they really evoke the Bhakti Rasa or the Sringar Rasa which is like the backbone of Advaita philosophy.

So tell us about the Sringar and Bhakti and how they kind of, you know, dissolve or, you know, kind of melt into each other.

Because that's something which not everybody would know about.

We are not absolutely sure about the exact dating, but definitely it was between these two centuries.

And in the Natashastra emerges our own understanding of Indian art through the Rasa theory because the Rasa theory was also expounded by Bharat Muni.

So Bharatanatyam becomes the dance as espoused by Bharat Muni in his Natashastra.

Even though it was a text on dramaturgy, you had everything in it.

There's contemporary.

They'll do Kathak and Bharatanatyam right next to each other.

And that's the

point, which is what's really cool about it.

Uh-huh.

But then we also had to do Bharatanatyam and Kathak and Garba and, like, like, let's try Bhangra and, um, just all these other styles of South Asian dance, 'cause there's so many.

Like, cultural, like, culturally dependent.

Mm-hmm.

And then after these dance classes, I would go back to my hotel.

I would keep practicing just, like, what I learned that day.

I would sit in, like, a low, what is called an aramandi, which is a low squat in, like, this one traditional style of dance in Bharatanatyam, to, like, train my quads, just to build up my strength and my stamina.

Oh my gosh.

Let's turn the spotlight on to Radhe Jaggi now.

What happens when the human body becomes an entire language? That's my way of describing Bharatanatyam, the Indian classical dance tradition from Tamil Nadu, that's South India.

Intricate footwork, hand gestures, facial expressions and extraordinary physical precision combine to tell stories, evoke emotion and explore everything from the human to the divine.

And one of the dancers carrying that ancient form into the present is Radhe Jaggi.

I went to see her perform Bhakta in London recently and I was mesmerised and transported.

So, Rade, for someone who's never experienced a Bharatanatyam recital performance, how would you describe what's happening when you dance? What are you doing and revealing?

There's so many things happening at the same time.

One is, of course, you have the technical choreography of it that you're thinking about.

So what's the style then that you do?

Bharatanatyam.

Okay.

And that's where I did my first exam and then stopped at it.

Um-

Uh, and where you are from India, it would, would that be more traditional to practice the type that you practice?

Bharatanatyam, yeah.

Yeah, okay.

All of the t- of the dancers around the temples in Odisha, which is the, the temple dance that I study, are in this Tribhangi.

It's not in Bharatnatyam.

It's not in, um, uh, it's not in several, you know, Kathak.

It's, Tribhangi is very specific to this.