Andhra Pradesh - Visakhapatnam   

It’s the rhythm that matters!

— Photo: K.R. Deepak

LEARNING BY TOUCH: A hearing and speech impaired student Sakti Swaroopa Bir dances to the rhythm of Odissi dance exponent Chitharanjan Acharya at a programme organised by the Department of Dance, Andhra University, in Visakhapatnam on Wednesday.

VISAKHAPATNAM: Art has been used as a therapeutic tool for treating mental and physical disabilities. It helps disabled children to increase their cognitive or communicative skills, motor coordination, develop speech and expression, originality and creativity. Learning to sing, dance and act enables them to socialise better, to become confident and be self-sufficient.

However, it is also a big challenge for a teacher to impart artistic skills to a differently-abled person. How will you teach a hearing-impaired child to skip on the second beat in the rhythm cycle of a song? Or a mentally-challenged person to understand the nuances of music?

Odissi dance exponent Chitharanjan Acharya of Orissa is one such artiste who has been training differently-abled persons in classical dances since the past few decades. “It is important to be patient and develop a different mindset to teach such individuals. The differently-abled persons are highly sensitive to any kind of stressful environment. They tend to withdraw into their cocoon,” he says.

He was here to give a lecture and demonstration on the methods of teaching classical dance to deaf and dumb students at a programme organised by the Department of Dance at Andhra University on Wednesday.

Chitharanjan Acharya has trained a couple of hearing-impaired girls in Odissi dance in par excellence with other prominent Odissi dancers.

“I give utmost importance to rhythm and then concentrate on the footwork. For the hearing impaired, understanding rhythm and visualising it is very crucial,” he says.

He was here with one of his students Sakti Swaroopa Bir who has been under his guidance for the past 20 years. She is now a trained Odissi dancer and has also worked in a feature film called ‘Humari Beti’ that was screened at the 42nd Chicago Film Festival in 2006.

“It has been a great learning experience for me and I took it up as a challenge. To teach her the finer nuances of the art, I had to go a step further and learn vocal music and various instruments,” he says.

At the end, he believes that, it is a day-to-day challenge and a give-and-take process.

“The bigger challenge is to make them self-sufficient and to rehabilitate them,” he adds.

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