Indian Dance Research Articles

THE DANCE OF JUSTICE: A RAWLSIAN PERSPECTIVE IN SRIVIDYA NATARAJAN’S THE UNDOING DANCE

This article delves into the role of Bharatanatyam, a classical Indian dance, as a transformative force for Kalyani, the protagonist in the novel The Undoing Dance (2018). It investigates how Bharatanatyam serves not only as a form of artistic expression but also as a means of transcending caste boundaries and societal expectations. By applying the concept of the difference principle, a framework within socio-political theory, the study examines how caste-based discrimination is confronted and reimagined through the medium of dance. Natarajan's narrative, which alternates between past and present, underscores the significance of Bharatanatyam in conveying Kalyani’s inner turmoil, struggles, and ultimate empowerment. Kalyani’s journey is marked by her revaluation of her Devadasi roots—a lineage steeped in both cultural richness and societal stigmatisation. As she reconnects with her heritage, she gains a deeper understanding of the matriarchal traditions within her community and begins to reinterpret them through her dance. This exploration leads to a redefined sense of identity and womanhood, where Bharatanatyam becomes a vessel for Kalyani’s self-expression and liberation. This study argues that classical dance, particularly Bharatanatyam, provides a unique lens through which the complexities of the Indian caste system can be viewed, offering Devadasi women in South India a powerful tool for reclaiming their narratives and challenging the entrenched social hierarchies. Through dance, Kalyani not only reclaims her heritage but also transforms her pain and suffering into a powerful statement of resilience and identity.

Dance Teacher Education at Shiv Nadar Schools: Issues, Challenges, and Opportunities

ABSTRACT With India’s long tradition of dance as a form of cultural preservation and current policy expectations, it is inevitable that dance practices in Indian K12 schools will experience growth. Given the status of dance teacher education in the country, it is unclear if current and future dance educators are prepared to meet this expansion. In this article, the authors report on a qualitative research project that, through semi-structured interviews with K12 dance teachers in the Delhi NCR region of India, sought to better understand teacher preparedness and to hear from the teachers themselves about what issues, challenges, and opportunities they face. The results are organized into the broad themes of a) navigating ourselves as dance teachers, b) navigating dance in schools, and c) navigating dance in India. Based on these results, suggestions are made for future professional development.

Indian dance (Bharatanatyam) to ease social loneliness and isolation in older adults

ABSTRACT Older adults worldwide are facing disproportionate levels of isolation and loneliness. The current frameworks for understanding social isolation and loneliness include factors such as the physical and mental health of the individuals, loss of friends and family, level of education, relationships, and the built environment. While these models are useful, they fail to consider the individual experiences of older adults holistically; as an example, they do not include older adults’ relationship with themselves as they navigate the many challenges of life. In this article, I propose a novel framework for describing social isolation and loneliness in older adults that includes relationships to their changing bodies and experiences, to history and literature, and to nature and current events. Considering this revised framework, I summarize my observations as a teaching artist using Bharatanatyam, a 2,000-year-old Indian traditional dance form, in alleviating loneliness and isolation. Outcomes are in the form of qualitative narratives that are thematically united and presented. Given the highly communicative and relational nature of Bharatanatyam, I hypothesize that immersion in Bharatanatyam will enable connections of various kinds. This article describes three ways in which Bharatanatyam is particularly well-suited to build connections; these are 1. Connection with oneself in body, mind, and psyche; 2. Connection to tradition and history and 3. A systematic structure of relating to others, to the nature and environment, and current events.

The Use of Hand Gestures (Hastas) in Bharatanatyam for Creative Aging.

Bharatanatyam is a traditional Indian dance form that involves the use of facial expressions and body movements to tell stories. A key aspect of Bharatanatyam is the use of hand gestures, also known as hastas, which are used to communicate with specificity and precision. Hastas are symbols, and along with facial expressions and body movements that are contextually relevant, they help to communicate narratives. I am a neuroscientist and have been immersed in Bharatanatyam for 25 years; true to the tradition of the form that emphasizes lifelong scholarship and immersion, I continue to learn from my gurus and supplement my dance training with the study of Carnatic music and Sanskrit. My journey in creative aging started after losing my mother and witnessing the lack of access to expressive movement that was available to her; for fear of falls, my previously-dynamic mother spent the last three months of her life without leaving the bed or feeling the sunshine on her skin. By using hastas in the context of creative aging, I describe how we can promote the acquisition of new skills, the physical benefits even in the face of arthritis and limited mobility, the ability to ascribe meaning to the gestures, and the capability to form new meanings and new gestures that are contemporary and relevant to the lives of older adults. Above all, we can engage older adults actively in the creation and appreciation of art.

GAMNet: A deep learning approach for precise gesture identification

Deep learning has gained popularity across several industries, including object recognition and classification. In the case of Convolutional Neural Networks (CNN), the first layers extract the most noticeable elements, such as shape and margin. As the model progresses, it learns to extract more complex features such as texture and color; conversely, skeleton features encompass significant locations (joints) that do not naturally align with the grid-like architecture intended for these networks. This study emphasizes the importance of structural features in enhancing the performance of deep learning models. It introduces the Gesture Analysis Module Network (GAMNet), which computes abstract structural values within the architecture for feature extraction, prioritization, and classification. These values go through a rigorous evaluation process along with the cutting-edge deep learning model, CNN, and result in intermediate representations, leading to better performance in gesture analysis. An automated dance gesture identification system can address the challenges of recognizing hand movements in unpredictable lighting, varied backgrounds, noise, and changing camera angles. Despite these challenges, GAMNet performed remarkably well, surpassing renowned models like VGGNet, ResNet, EfficientNet, and CNN, achieving a classification accuracy of 96.80%, even in challenging image circumstances. This paper highlights how GAMNet can revolutionize the world of classical Indian dance, opening up new opportunities for research and development in this field.

AI and augmented reality for 3D Indian dance pose reconstruction cultural revival

This paper delves into the specialized domain of human action recognition, focusing on the Identification of Indian classical dance poses, specifically Bharatanatyam. Within the dance context, a “Karana” embodies a synchronized and harmonious movement encompassing body, hands, and feet, as defined by the Natyashastra. The essence of Karana lies in the amalgamation of nritta hasta (hand movements), sthaana (body postures), and chaari (leg movements). Although numerous, Natyashastra codifies 108 karanas, showcased in the intricate stone carvings adorning the Nataraj temples of Chidambaram, where Lord Shiva’s association with these movements is depicted. Automating pose identification in Bharatanatyam poses challenges due to the vast array of variations, encompassing hand and body postures, mudras (hand gestures), facial expressions, and head gestures. To simplify this intricate task, this research employs image processing and automation techniques. The proposed methodology comprises four stages: acquisition and pre-processing of images involving skeletonization and Data Augmentation techniques, feature extraction from images, classification of dance poses using a deep learning network-based convolution neural network model (InceptionResNetV2), and visualization of 3D models through mesh creation from point clouds. The use of advanced technologies, such as the MediaPipe library for body key point detection and deep learning networks, streamlines the identification process. Data augmentation, a pivotal step, expands small datasets, enhancing the model’s accuracy. The convolution neural network model showcased its effectiveness in accurately recognizing intricate dance movements, paving the way for streamlined analysis and interpretation. This innovative approach not only simplifies the identification of Bharatanatyam poses but also sets a precedent for enhancing accessibility and efficiency for practitioners and researchers in the Indian classical dance.

The effects of a culturally informed community-based dance movement therapy programme for persons with Parkinson’s disease in India

Dance and movement therapy (DMT) and Western dance forms have been advocated for the effective management of Parkinson’s Disease (PD). This study focuses on including culturally relevant Indian dance concepts in developing and evaluating a community-based DMT programme for PD. This is the first comparative study on DMT for PD conducted in India, with a control group of a ‘physical exercise programme’. 34 People with Parkinson’s Disease (PwPs) were assigned to a ‘DMT intervention’ or a ‘Physical exercise group’ using convenience sampling and they attended weekly 90-minute sessions over 12 weeks. Mood, physical and cognitive functioning, and quality of life were measured pre-and post-interventions. Results and subjective feedback from PwPs suggest that DMT intervention was more effective in improving positive mood and reducing depression in PD as compared to the control group. This study concludes that culturally informed community-based DMT programmes hold promise as a supportive intervention for PwPs in India.

Indian Dance Criticism as Decolonial Post-Performance Performative

This paper examines dance reviews of transnational performances of Indian male dancers Uday Shankar and Ram Gopal from the 1930s to the 1950s. Throughout, this research seeks to contribute to methods for decolonizing dance criticism by advocating for embodied spectatorship as well as evaluation that challenges hegemony by validating classical traditions and innovative artistry. Western and Indian critics savored the rasa, meaning the flavor of the performances, and criticism reactivated the felt or sensorial experience in what I term post-performance performative. In India, anti-Orientalist criticism reclaimed traditions that critics in Europe and the United States had dismissed as irrational and unprogressive.

Censorship and the Nationalization of Dance in India: An Overview from 1947 to the Present

In this essay, I present a broad overview of the intersections between dance and censorship in independent India. I try to explore the consequent exclusions within the mainstream dance discourse and practices as they were shaped by hegemonic forces of nationalism. I also look at how the changes in instruments and objectives of censorship reflect changing visions of nationalism. Thisessay broadly examines two major forms of censorship, both of which have been crucial in the appropriation and reconstruction of dance as an integral part of the nationalist cultural identity of India. First, there are the overt forms of censorship, which have been enforced by instruments of state power like legislation and statutory bodies. The post-independence government enacted the Madras Devadasis (Prevention of Dedication) Act 1947 and Cinematograph Act 1952 ostensibly for socialreformandprotectionofpublicmorality,butineffectthey carried forward socio-political biases of Orientalism and colonialism into the postcolonial project of constructing the Indian imaginary. The process necessitated the elimination of hereditary artist communities and professional women performers (and many of their movement idioms) from mainstream practices of dance, even as their art was decontextualized and reconstructedtosuittheofficiallysanctifiedhighculture. This mode of erasure also influenced popular forms ofdance, especially those appearing in Indian cinema, by inscribing them with nationalist notions of womanhood, sexuality, and, more recently, religious majoritarianism. Second, I trace the covert operation of censorship, in which state institutions play a key role in the support and promotion of art. Through selective funding and promotion, conferring privileging labels like “classical,” and presiding over the formalization and classicization of dance, these institutions helped fit dance practices within the nationalist framework of a normative Indian cultural identity that is predominantly Hindu and rahminical. This process resulted in hierarchization, stigmatization, and even omission of certain dance practices, some of which I have highlighted in this essay. The sustained influence of direct and indirect modes of censorship created standardized codes of aesthetics and performance practices, contributing to a chilling effect and leading practitioners to censor themselves. Finally, I argue that the centrality of dance in the national cultural discourse enabled its use as propaganda to censor negative actions of or perceptions about the government. The phenomenon, which may be described as artwashing, has become increasingly prominent in the contemporary context of Hindu majoritarian nationalism seeking to launder itsexclusionary tendencies in the process of redefining Indian cultural identity on its terms. Thus, I argue that censorship in the domain of dance has played not just a repressive role but also a productive role by enabling discourses of nationalism. It has acted as a tool of governmentality, by which nationalist ideologies have been established and reinforced to public, such that they are no longer confined to the sphere of the state but have percolated down to the conduct of individuals.

Who does the story belong to? The politics of power in collaborative performance

In this article, I interrogate my work Encounters with Dr Yashoda Thakore and her guru Annabattula Mangatayaru who are from the kalavantulu community (a marginalized, banned and ostracized dance community) based in Hyderabad and Mummidivaram in Andhra and our historic collaboration with the Melbourne Symphony Orchestra (MSO). Two extremes it would seem bridged together by the work I was doing with our platform/festival Sangam, created to provide representation for marginalized, under-represented and racialized South Asian artists in Melbourne, Victoria. Based on my research that spans fifteen years, the Encounters performance reveals the story of five South Indian dancers (known as devadasi/kalavantulu) and three musicians who toured to Paris in 1838, at a time when India was colonized by France. One significant encounter occurred in Paris when a teenaged dancer called Ammany and the rest of the troupe met several composers in Vienna including Johann Strauss I and Joseph Lanner. The MSO had been playing some pieces from this encounter (Indianner Galopp and Malapou Galopp) not aware of its historic intercultural significance. Yashoda and her guru were also performing fragments of their repertoire descended from Ammany not aware of this connection. My research forms the third part of this puzzle; of knowing only fragments until all of us came together. Each of us contributed to the anti-colonial experimental piece that was created, but whose story was this? Who had the rights to perform this story? To engage in this question, I explore the idea of cultural property and intellectual property (IP) rights, licensing and copyright agreements to embark upon a moral and ethical framework not used usually in Australian–Indian performance praxis. I draw from my work with BlakDance and its First Nations IP process to question and interrogate the complexities of sharing stories, the politics of making intercultural work in Australia and examine who profits from this process whether it is economic, symbolic, political or via cultural capital and propose a cultural IP framework for the global majority in Australia.

Generative adversarial network based data augmentation and quantum based convolution neural network for the classification of Indian classical dance forms

The study addresses the challenges of human action recognition and analysis in computer vision, with a focus on classifying Indian dance forms. The complexity of these dance styles, including variations in body postures and hand gestures, makes classification difficult. Deep learning models require large datasets for good performance, so standard data augmentation techniques are used to increase model generalizability. The study proposes the Indian Classical Dance Generative Adversarial Network (ICD-GAN) for augmentation and the quantum-based Convolutional Neural Network (QCNN) for classification. The research consists of three phases: traditional augmentation, GAN-based augmentation, and a combination of both. The proposed QCNN is introduced to reduce computational time. Different GAN variants DC-GAN, CGAN, MFCGAN are employed for augmentation, while transfer learning-based CNN models VGG-16, VGG-19, MobileNet-v2, ResNet-50, and new QCNN are implemented for classification. The study demonstrates that GAN-based augmentation outperforms traditional methods, and QCNN reduces computational complexity while improving prediction accuracy. The proposed method achieves a precision rate of 98.7% as validated through qualitative and quantitative analysis. It provides a more effective and efficient approach compared to existing methods for Indian dance form classification.

Bharatanatyam and Art activism in the Networked Digital Space

All over the world, traditional models of art activism through dance involved performances that reached a limited audience, while the advent of networked digital spaces has vastly expanded the scope of art activism to a global level. Offering a qualitative netnographic exploration of how Bharatanatyam has been employed for such art activism in the digital space, this article examines the implications for this prominent traditional South Indian dance form in terms of stylistic changes as well as viewer reactions. Through content analysis of the viewer responses to ten popular renditions uploaded on YouTube over five years (2016–2020), we trace how the art form is evolving and how activist goals are reciprocated by the audience. Our findings confirm that Bharatanatyam has great potential to evolve by adapting novel social themes. However, while such contemporary renditions may elicit viewer responses that critically appraise specific social issues and pave the way for social change, the resulting innovations continue to co-exist with old conflicts and tensions about ‘traditional’ art and its uses.

Resurgence of Male Performers in Indian Dance: A Study of Guru Kelucharan Mohapatra?s Contribution

Resurgence of Male Performers in Indian Dance: A Study of Guru Kelucharan Mohapatra?s Contribution

Kafka’s Ape Meets the Natyashastra

To the Academy is a multi-media performance work that makes poignant and humorous commentary about education, common paradigms of diversity, and the oppressive nature of institutional labor. Created through a dialogue between myself, an Indian American with training in various forms of physical theatre and Indian dance, and Guyanese-Canadian actor Marc Gomes, it has been performed at several universities and arts centers since 2015. In this essay, I will interrogate the ways in which we place select elements of “Indian tradition” at the service of the piece’s overarching theme of histories of European domination, asking whether making these cultural materials subservient to our political agenda constitutes a form of appropriation. I examine three components of the work: the character of the classical Indian dancer who appears in the first section of the show, the explicit references to the ancient Sanskrit treatise on performance, the Natyashastra, and the framing of both these elements within our adaptation of Franz Kafka’s story, “Report to an Academy,” about an ape who learns to impersonate humans. In so doing, I explore the ethical responsibilities artists of color have in working with intercultural aesthetics. Furthermore, I assert the inevitably ambivalent nature of activist performance, even if artists aim to resist hegemonic structures.

Rupture and Disruption: Reflections on “Making” and “Knowing” Dance

This essay follows a somewhat unconventional approach to writing about Indian dance in the diaspora. I say “unconventional” because it unfolds as a kind of self-reflexive narration of my own journey as a “doubly diasporic” Indian dancer, born in Singapore but having made my career in North America. In essence, I map my own unconventional paths to understanding Indian dance in the diaspora, outside the tired and troublesome idea of “dance as heritage”. The aim of this critical meditation on my own work is to offer up new possibilities for moving Indian dance into progressive conceptual spaces that direct it out of the discursive field of cultural nationalism that frames the idea of “heritage”.

Review: Readings on Dance – from 75 years of Marg, September-December 2022

The issue ‘Readings on Dance – from 75 years of Marg', 2022 is an excellent compilation of articles published over 75 years. It is a collectors’ item on Indian Dance. The issue addresses dance in all its aspects and formats. Beginning with the depictions of dance and music in the Bagh Caves the subjects covers many dance types in India. The thematic sections which would interest readers are -

Automatic one-hand gesture (mudra) identification in bharatanatyam using eigenmudra projections and convolutional neural networks

Mudras in traditional Indian dance forms convey meaningful information when performed by an artist. The subtle changes between the different mudras in a dance form render automatic identification challenging as compared to conventional hand gesture identification, where the gestures are uniquely distinct from each other. Therefore, the objective of this study is to build a classifier model for the identification of the asamyukta mudra of bharatanatyam, one of the most popular classical dance forms in India. The first part of the paper provides a comprehensive review of the issues present in bharatanatyam mudra identification and the various studies conducted on the automatic classification of mudras. Based on this review, we observe that the unavailability of a large mudra corpus is a major challenge in mudra identification. Therefore, the second part of the paper focuses on the development of a relatively large database of mudra images consisting of 29 asamyukta mudras prevalent in bharatanatyam, which is obtained by incorporating different variabilities, such as subject, artist type (amateur or professional), and orientation. The mudra image database so developed is made available for academic research purposes. The final part of this paper describes the development of a convolutional neural network (CNN)-based automatic mudra identification system. Multistyle training of mudra classes on a conventional CNN showed a 92% correct identification rate. Based on the “eigenface” projection used in face recognition, “eigenmudras” projections of mudra images are proposed for improving the CNN-based mudra identification. Although the CNNs trained on the eigenmudra-projected images provide nearly equal identification rates as that obtained using the CNNs trained on raw mudra grayscale images, both models provide complementary mudra class information. The presence of complementary class information is confirmed by the improvement in the mudra identification performance when the CNN models trained from the raw mudra and eigenmudra-projected images are combined by computing the average of the scores obtained in the final softmax layers of both models. The same trend of improved mudra identification is observed upon combination of the average score level of VGG19 CNN models of the raw mudra images and corresponding eigenmudra-projected images.

LANGUAGE AND COMMUNICATIVE MOVEMENT: DANCE, DISCOURSE REPRESENTATION, AND ILLOCUTIONS

This paper endeavors to open up the domain of narrative dance to formal semantico-pragmatic inquiry, taking case studies from Indian dance drama and classical Ballet. It thus posits narrative dance as a richly promising domain of research and analysis in its analogues to, and interfaces with, discourse based on language. The communicative intent of narrative dance – alongside its aesthetic-cultural semiosis – is typically directed at the audience’s (re)cognition of discourse referents and their actions in the dance space. It therefore lends itself to the scrutiny of Discourse Representation Theory or, more broadly, dynamic semantics, which are recognized frameworks for the formal linguistic analysis of narrative, and more rarely non-narrative, discourse. This intent in dance, however, differs from those of ordinary-language communications, in that it allows for creative play to convey shifting discourse-referent identities. Such creative play is brought into focus in the very different treatments of “stage” versus “individual”-level identities of the respective central characters within two case studies, viz., the (North-)Eastern Indian dance drama Chitrāngadā, on the one hand, and Tchaikovsky’s Swan Lake, on the other. While illocutions are conveyed through hand-gestures and (facial and corporeal) mime in these different traditions, they crucially play a complementary role in discourse representation as this latter pertains to narrative dance. The paper concludes by highlighting this mode of analysis as a means of achieving greater insight into viewers’ / connoisseurs’ responses to narrative and non-narrative dance subtypes as possible clues as to how meanings are construed out of these dance genres.

Jump Up! Caribbean Carnival Music in New York

Jump Up! Caribbean Carnival Music in New York

Study on BMI and selected physical fitness components of Chhau dancer and Traditional game players

Chhau dance is a semi classical Indian dance with martial art and folk traditions. The dance ranges from celebrating martial arts, acrobatics and athletics performed in festive themes of a folk dance, to a structured dance with religious themes. Traditional game provides unique opportunities that conventional games may not have. They are generally based on fun and participation rather than competition and connect more important things beyond sports and physical activities. The purpose of this study was - to find out difference in BMI and physical fitness components between chhau dancer and traditional game players. To observed the relationship between BMI and physical fitness components of chhau dancer and traditional game players. The researcher was selected 156 male subjects from two groups. 78 subjects were chhau dancer who regular practice their dance and performed chhau dance programs. 78 subjects were traditional game players who played different traditional games. The obtained results of the study that chhau dancer was better fitness than traditional game players on the respect of explosive leg strength, agility and flexibility. But there was no significant difference between the means of reaction time of chhau dancer and traditional game players. There was positive relationship between BMI with reaction time of chhau dancer, but there was no relationship between BMI with explosive leg strength, agility and flexibility of chhau dancer. Other side there was no relationship between BMI with reaction time, explosive leg strength, agility and flexibility of traditional game players.