Friday Review
Bangalore
Chennai and Tamil Nadu
Delhi
Hyderabad
Thiruvananthapuram
A union to delight the senses
ANJANA RAJAN
|
They are like the lion and the lamb of the art world — he a multifaceted master, she a lovely dancer. Meet Narasimhachari and Vasanthalakshmi.
|
Photo: M. Karunakaran
Dancing duo Narasimhachari and Vasanthalakshmi in Chennai.
He was known as a formidable child prodigy who did wonders with the theory and practice of music. And she was his child bride, choosing to marry him at 12, when he was 24! Forty years later, this is a lion and lamb combination to delight the heart.
“Dance and music are progressive sciences,” says veteran Bharatanatyam and Kuchipudi exponent Narasimhachari. He should know, having progressed from a childhood spent performing the traditional art of Burra Katha from Andhra Pradesh to a life as one of the most erudite and creative artistes proficient in Carnatic music and dance. All these years, the delight of being a learner has never left him. Nor has it left Vasanthalakshmi, his wife and dancing partner for the past four decades. The two have the shastras of dance on their fingertips. They quote them in Sanskrit, English and Tamil, but not with pedantry. Because at heart, they realise that dance and music are performing arts.
“The purpose of natya itself is to entertain, and at the same time to elevate,” says Vasanthalakshmi, trained under S. Bhoopal and Adyar Lakshmanan among others. But choreographic or musical wizardry is not the key to entertainment. “Talam, I would say, is a double-edged knife,” she muses. Adds Narasimhachari, “You can raise a dance to heights or you can kill it.” The raga and tala of a composition, they note, should evolve organically instead of being treated like structures into which a dance composition is fitted.
The duo, trained in Kathak, Odissi and Mohiniattam besides Bharatanatyam and Kuchipudi, feels that dance is currently in its golden age. Says Narasimhachari, “In every art there is a cycle. After rising it has to fall. Just as the period of the Trinity (Tyagaraja, Muttuswami Dikshitar and Shyama Shastri) was the golden period for music, this is the golden period for dance.”
Even while they disapprove of the rampant commercialisation of the art, they feel there is more to be happy than unhappy about in the dance field. Conceding that some artistes use money to get performance opportunities, they say quality wins in the end. Based in Chennai, they have seen the December-January festival season burst into an unmanageable crowd of cultural organisations and aspiring artistes. This situation has generated a competitive spirit that bodes well for dance. Each guru wants to make a mark on the field, and creativity flowers.
Narasimhachari, who is currently the president of the Association of Bharatanatyam Artistes of India (Abhai), says he encourages male dancers, as boys often drop out of the race due to family pressures. He doesn’t charge fees from boys, and, since they are expected to be breadwinners, tries to find them jobs. “I also teach choreography, nattuvangam, music…. I want to give them complete knowledge so they don’t leave the art,” he says.
Besides, says Vasanthalakshmi, now that gurus are open to the idea of inviting dancers from various gharanas to work in their choreographic productions, freelancing is becoming a viable option for male dancers. In their own productions too, say the Narasimhacharis, who founded the Kala Samarpana Foundation to teach and propagate the arts in 1969, their effort is to offer roles to dancers trained under other gurus as well.
Narasimhachari’s own youth was a sought-after one. In 1962, having studied music under stalwarts like D. Pasupati, S. R. Janakiraman, Chitoor Subramania Pillai and V. N. Janakiraman at the Tirupati College of Music for just a year, he was handpicked by Rukmini Devi Arundale when she saw his immense potential. Soon after he joined her institution Kalakshetra, he recalls, the legendary musicologist Professor Sambamoorthy organised a quiz for the dance and music students. “I got 100 per cent,” chuckles Narasimhachari. “Athai (Rukmini Devi) was very impressed. She asked me, ‘Have you really only studied music for a year?”’
Soon she had him tutoring Kalakshetra’s final year students for the Sangita Siromani exams affiliated to the University of Madras. It might have gone to a young lad’s head. But half a century, performances across the globe and 25 choreographic productions later, he is as down to earth as ever.
Because, as Vasanthalakshmi says, an artiste will keep growing “as long as you have butterflies in the stomach.”
Not having received a national award to date, Narasimhachari points out, “There is no award greater than when a guru tells a shishya you did very well.”
Printer friendly
page
Send this article to Friends by
E-Mail
Friday Review
Bangalore
Chennai and Tamil Nadu
Delhi
Hyderabad
Thiruvananthapuram
|
