Spiritual Dance: Traditional Indian Dance

By Leela Ganapathy

Art is collaboration between God and Man, raising him to the exclusive band of creators and taking him deeply within and around his hard work. It is a unique result of a unique temperament with its beauty derived from mutable disconcert of his environment. When early man stenciled an impression of the dark of wall of the cave, he was deliberately, vision and creation.



This story of art has been largely the story of man’s continuing search of meaningful marks for shape, movement and image that can most eloquently express his experience of the inner and outer world, resulting in enlargement and perpetuation. Such a man, bestowed with reason, had always been a grater thinker, when absorbed in his surroundings he was pondering, imaging and visualizing the shape of things to come about the domestic carvings and comforts in life.

Creation motivated by different desires resulted knowingly or unknowingly in chronicling his present for the future and preserving them for posterity.
These instincts found their vent in different forms and in fact they were the foundation of the birth of fine arts. Born thus, the arts improved from stage to stage and from age to age in different forms and styles, from the initial crude lines to the superfine form and movement.
In ancient India, fine arts of dance, painting and sculpture were developed and inspired by religion. All arts like all stages of life and embodied in religion. Indian art is life suffixed by religion and philosophy. Art was dedicated to providing objects of worship in a life ordered by faith. Indian art of all the periods has been close to life both divine and traditional.
The theory of Indian dance cannot be isolated from the arts of literature, sculpture, painting and music. Human nature with its joy and sorrow is depicted by means of representation through dance.
Dance is the rhythmic physical movement prompted by feelings and emotions from the cavemen through the growth of civilization. Beins the supreme art, its scope as explained by Bharata in its Natya sastra embraces all themes of life.

Indian dance takes human figure as its basic instrumental of expression and its synthesis at the technique of other arts becoming the most beautiful and significant approach of the Hindu mind. Dance has a message for its audience that exhorts to live the deal life in the path of righteousness, prosperity and fame.

There are dance traditions of India, of different regions and at different levels of society, each dance tradition has to be clearly identified both in terms of the evolution of artistic form and style in time, and its socio-cultural pattern within the dance traditions flourished is a highly abstract approach on one level and a preoccupation with multiple symbolic form on the other.

In India tribal, folk, and classical dance are continually merging into each other, inter acting and in many moments of historical time co-exist. There are dance traditions that are prevalent in different parts of India. Each region has its distinctive forms that can be further subdivided into three broad levels of the tribal folk and classical dances. While the first two terms suggest a socio-economic stratification, the last indicates the degree of stylization in form rather than a socio-economic level. The classical dance styles of all regions in India share certain common fundamentals of a technique. Today about five dances namely Bharatanatyam. Kathakali, Orissi,Manipuri and Kathak are recognized as classical, to these could be added others which falls into the category of traditional dance drama forms such as kuchipudi form Andhra Pradesh, yakshagana from Mysore, and Kudiattam of Kerala.

The oral tradition provides the constant vehicle of communication and mobility within groups and regions: a common body of myth- legend literature unites the three levels and cuts across normal insular socio-economic stratification between classical and folk, urban and village elicits and popular.