Journey
Classical dance geographies — court, temple, sattra, gharana, village
The eight classical dances were not classical in 1900. Each was a temple, court or village practice performed mostly by hereditary women or by men in specific castes, and each was codified, renamed and moved onto a proscenium stage between about 1930 and 1960 — usually by outsiders, and usually as the older performers were being legislated out of work.
Stops (11)
- Thanjavur Quartet · The Thanjavur Quartet — the form before the name
Chinnayya, Ponnayya, Sivanandam and Vadivelu, four brothers at the Thanjavur court in the early nineteenth century, arranged the sadir repertoire into the sequence — alarippu, jatiswaram, shabdam, varnam, padam, tillana — that Bharatanatyam still performs. The form is theirs; the name is a twentieth-century replacement.
- Kalakshetra, Chennai · Kalakshetra — Bharatanatyam onto the stage
Rukmini Devi Arundale founded Kalakshetra at Madras in 1936 and took sadir from the devadāsi households onto a concert stage, changing the costume, removing the erotic padams and giving the form a new name. The Madras Devadasis Act of 1947 ended the older practice. What was rescued and what was taken is still argued about in Tamil Nadu.
- Mahari and Odissi, Puri · Purī — the mahāris and Odissi
The Jagannātha temple's mahāri dancers performed the Gītagovinda before the deity for centuries, and the gotipua boys danced it outside. Odissi as a stage form was assembled in the 1950s from what the last mahāris and gotipua masters remembered, by scholars and dancers working against the clock.
- Sattriya, Majuli · Majuli — Sattriya in the namghar
Shankaradeva made dance part of the liturgy in the Assam sattras in the sixteenth century, performed by celibate monks inside the namghar as part of Ankiyā Bhāonā. It was recognised as a classical form only in 2000, and it is the only one of the eight that has never stopped being performed in the building it was made for.
- Kuchipudi village · Kuchipudi — a village and a caste
An Andhra village whose Brahmin families performed a dance-drama tradition, men playing all roles, under a grant from a seventeenth-century Golconda sultan. Siddhendra Yogi is credited with the Bhāmākalāpam. The solo stage form now called Kuchipudi is a twentieth-century extraction from that village theatre.
- Melattur Bhagavata Mela, Thanjavur · Melattur — the Bhāgavata Mela
A Thanjavur-district dance-drama performed once a year by the men of one village, in Telugu, with a repertoire from the Maratha court period and a tradition that the performer of Narasimha wears a mask that must be treated as the deity. It has never been staged commercially.
- Lucknow Kathak gharana · Lucknow Kathak — the court
Kathak at the Awadh court under Wajid Ali Shah, who danced himself and staged the Rahas, is the gharana of abhinaya — expression, subtlety, the poetic line worked out in gesture. The form's Muslim court period is the part that twentieth-century respectability was most anxious to explain away.
- Jaipur Kathak gharana · Jaipur Kathak — the footwork
The Rajput court's Kathak line, known for speed, pirouettes and rhythmic complexity rather than for expression, and for a temple rather than a court origin story. Between them Jaipur and Lucknow divide the form into technique and meaning, and dancers still argue about which is the older.
- Banaras Kathak gharana · Banaras Kathak — the third line
Janakiprasad's lineage at Banaras, which claims to have invented the bol, the spoken rhythmic syllable, and which sits between the other two in style. The city holds a Kathak gharana, a tabla gharana, a sitar and shehnai tradition and a thumri style, which is more performance lineages than any other Indian city.
- Kalamandalam, Thrissur · Kalamandalam — Kathakali rescued by a poet
Vallathol Narayana Menon founded Kerala Kalamandalam in 1930 when Kathakali was dying with its last feudal patrons, raising money by lottery. It codified the training, brought in Mohiniyattam and Kutiyattam, and turned a temple and palace art into an institution with a syllabus.
- Kalpathy · Kalpathy — the agrahāram and the car festival
A Palakkad agrahāram of Tamil Brahmin families who migrated into Kerala, with a chariot festival and a concentration of Carnatic musicians unusual for a small town. It is the clearest surviving example of the street-and-temple settlement pattern that carried south Indian performance traditions between linguistic regions.