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Dance Buzz 2019
Natya Kala Conference gets big attendance
- 28 December 2019
One has not seen a fully-packed and spilling auditorium for the annual Natya Kala Conference hosted by Sri Krishna Gana Sabha in a nook of T. Nagar. But this was the scene as the conference on classical dance opened a shade after 1.20 p.m. on December 26, to unfold five days of talks, lec-dems and dance recitals.
There were over 1000 people - dancers, gurus, dance students and rasikas, not just from Chennai but from all over - from Mumbai and Bengaluru, from Mangaluru and Bhopal and Delhi and from all parts of Tamil Nadu too.
And this had happened because of a well-thought out, online and offline publicity and communication curated by dancer Rama Vaidyanathan, the conference convener and her creative collaborator, 'Alap' which is headed by Akila Krishnamurthy, the latter having been associated with this event for some years now.
As Akila put it on the sidelines of Day One, "We promoted this conference over many months, reaching out to a huge number of people and Rama also did a lot to reach out to gurus and organizations she knows well."
The theme of the conference is - 'Nirikshana - Bharatanatyam under the magnifying glass'. Rama later said that she chose to focus only on Bharatanatyam because of its hoary heritage, its huge spread and reach across the world and the many issues that this dance form engages with.
At the formal launch, veteran dance guru of Chennai, Ranganayaki Jayaraman, who was seated in a wheelchair on the stage, was decorated with the 'Natya Kala Virsaarada ha' award for her long services to dance as a guru. The chief guest was Odissi dancer and guru and now MP, Rajya Sabha, Sonal Mansingh.
And the first event of the sessions to follow got an extraordinary response,with the audience cheering and clapping often. For, on stage were three of India's celebrated dancers - Padma Subrahmanyam, Sudharani Raghupathy and Chitra Visweswaran. The session was themed 'Dance Buddies'.
As the trio sat on the stage in dimmed lights, the screen came alive with excerpts from 'Virali Malai Kuravanji' which the trio had performed for Doordarshan in the late 1980s. As the excerpts played, there were huge cheers from the audience. And then, backed by musicians seated behind them, the trio presented what seemed to be an impromptu performance from the Kuravanji, much to the amusement and interest of the audience.
Doordarshan producer (now retired) Seetha Ratnakar, who was present and rewinding to the times when she worked on the Kuravanji, came up on stage to give the back story - of the time in 1987 when a senior DD executive suggested the idea of bringing the famed trio of dancers into one production, of choosing late Shyamala's script and backgrounder of this Kuravanji for the DD show and of how she had to guide the trio to perform in a small circular space in the studio because the shoot was live and there would not be any editing of it - on the VHS tape. "That was a time when color TV had just been launched in India by DD and that's why the clips shown here are dullish," said Seetha, who got emotional.
Chitra Visweswaran said that the Kuravanji toured the then USSR, the Middle East and across India.
Later, dancer Malavika Sarukkai spoke on 'The Expanding Canvas': then there was a discussion on 'Concerns and Challenges of Dance Curation' and finally, Vaibhav Arekar and his Sankhya Dance Company artistes performed.
Video clips of the lec-dem sessions are being posted on the Facebook page of Natyakalaconference.
