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NDEO’s Guest Blog Series features posts written by our members about their experiences in the fields of dance and dance education. We continue this series with a post by Deepa Mahadevan, Research Scholar. Guest posts reflect the experiences, opinions, and viewpoints of the author and are printed here with their permission. NDEO does not endorse any business, product, or service mentioned in guest blog posts. If you are interested in learning more about the guest blogger program or submitting an article for consideration, please click here.

Is there something like pure aesthetics untainted by politics? This article explores the discomfort faced by researchers immersed in practice when critical research apparently conflicts with content. The author reflects on questions that arose when she participated in the choreographic process of Maya Kulkarni, New York based award winning choreographer.

What is common to Plato’s ‘Allegory of the cave,’ where Plato expresses his angst on how people are blinded by social conditioning and fail to understand the essence of things around us; the story from the epic, Ulysses, of Medea, the queen of Colches and lover of Jason, where she murders her own babies to seek revenge for the betrayal of her lover, Jason; the embodied plea of Varkari saints from India in the form of song, and dance as they travel long distances on foot to merge into the energy of their deity- Vittal of Pandaripur?

These are a few of the themes Maya Kulkarni, New York based award winning choreographer, has taken up for her choreographic explorations. The human drama and sometimes, the abjectness of these characters and their stories draw her to these narratives. They gnaw at her creative essence and she sets out to recreate these stories through the medium of dance.

We can only call it dance as she resists categories. For Kulkarni, the form is always at the service of dramaturgy. Kulkarni is a critically acclaimed solo Bharatanatyam performer. Her career as a soloist spans over five decades. But in her later creations, she resists being confined to a single style or idiom of movement. Her movement vocabulary draws from different mediums of dance and movement, be it the swaying of Varkari saints when they move intoxicated with devotional love, the spontaneous flight of a bumblebee, the teasing flips and turns of a parrot. The movement and as a result the form of her dance stems from a true exploration of reality finding form through the body of a trained dancer. A dancer is trained to move with intention, she is trained to convey an emotion using her body, to make love to space while responding to a melody or rhythm. Kulkarni works with these trained bodies to give shape to her choreographic vision.

Kulkarni has devised ‘Shilpanatnam’ a movement form that is driven by the dramaturgy of a narrative. The aesthetics of this form is sometimes irreverent to the expectations of many of the Indian dance forms that Kulkarni works with. For instance, Shilpanatanam pushes back on the preponderance of hand gestures or mudras that are typically used to convey meaning in many traditional Indian dance forms. She calls it a ‘code’ that many dancers use to communicate that is exclusive and often precludes accessibility. Instead, she strives to express through full bodied movements that ‘show’ and ‘become’ the action than ‘tell’ through symbolic gestures or mudras. It blends different movement styles and the form thus created is always at the service of dramaturgy. It is constantly in a state of becoming and resists being categorized.

Using this idiom of Shilpa Natanam, Kulkarni is creating a work on artist scholar, Kaustavi Sarkar, and myself. This work tells stories from Hindu mythology. While embodying Kulkarni’s imagination in our trained Odissi and Bharatanatyam bodies, Sarkar and I were acutely aware that the narratives chosen this time by Kulkarni were from the Ramayana and Mahabaratha, two major Hindu epics from India. This could be considered problematic as it emboldens the disproportionate share of content from upper caste Hindu mythology in most Indian dance forms categorized as ‘classical.’ These forms tend to abet a spirit of majoritarian nationalism. Specifically with Bharatanatyam, I have joined many scholars in pointing out that the most verifiable lived history of Bharatanatyam and the repertoire of the dance form that we practice today can only be traced as far back to the seventeenth century to the figure of the hereditary dancer who practiced it as a profession in the courts of Tanjavur. While there was a share of religious content in these dances, largely the courtly repertoire that we draw from today in Bharatanatyam was amorous and erotic in content. Due to a complex set of factors triggered by political, colonial, patriarchal and colonial interests when Bharatanatyam was restructured in the early to mid-20th centuries it was re-formed to garner respectability by creating content that drew from upper caste Hindu religiosity. The protagonists for most pieces, inherited from the courtly repertoire, were replaced from local kings and chieftains to upper caste Hindu gods. This has reduced Bharatanatyam in popular consciousness to be a Hindu dance form obfuscating its erstwhile syncretic content from colonial Thanjavur.

This brief blog argues that whileKulkarni’s current work seems to add to the already inundated religious content of Indian dance forms it stands apart as the religiosity in its content is incidental. Kulkarni’s choreographic impetus is a direct response to the urge to explore the dramaturgical essence of a story. Framing it within the context of the Varkari tradition from west India, Kulkarni embarks to do what she has been doing for the past ten years - dance a story that has a strong emotional vortex at its core. The question for critical Indian dance history researchers like Sarkar and myself is how do we continue to tell these stories without appearing to embolden the upper caste Hindu majoritarian positioning of the dance form in popular consciousness.

For Kulkarni, who is a choreographer and storyteller, the form and the content is ruled by the dramaturgical scope of a narrative and flexing the muscle of critical theory during this creative process is threatening to be an artistic kill joy. Kulkarni has stories to tell about parrots, peacocks, the impossible romance between the lightning and the cloud, the mischievous bee, and many more; thus, the tussle between the venomous snake, Kaliya, and the young cowherd, Krishna, though from upper caste Hindu mythology, is yet another story to explore for her. While we revel in Kulkarni's creativity and the ways in which she brings our trained bodies to work her vision, Sarkar and I continue to search for that sweet spot that precariously balances the tension between raw creative energy and the problematic socio-political history of most Indian classical dance forms.

Dr. Deepa Mahadevan is an artist scholar. She is a Bharatanatyam practitioner, researcher, teacher, choreographer, and curator. She performs around the world. and conducts workshops on critical dance theory, movement, and embodied expressions. Her doctoral research in Performance studies the history of aesthetics in Bharatanatyam, through the vectors of caste, class, sexuality, gender and religion, between the 1930s till 2020. In her practice, she strives to explore, capture, and embody the potent energy of every emerging moment in a performance, setting it apart from pre-choreographed dances, which have significantly more predictable energy patterns. Mahadevan is the founder and artistic director of Tiruchitrambalam School of Dance where she teaches Bharatanatyam dance and critical dance history. She currently lives in New Jersey with her husband and 15-year-old daughter and 6-year-old German Shepherd puppy For more details - and

Photo credits in order from top to bottom: BAAD Bronx, Sharon Freer, Sumanapriya Krishnakumar, Jeyakumar Sathyamoorthy