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Introduction: What is "Bharatanatyam" & How do I Pronounce it??

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Introduction: What is "Bharatanatyam" & How do I Pronounce it??

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Bharatanatyam, or bʌrəte’naːtjəm, is a form of classical dance originating in South India. It was originally performed in temples in front of murtis, or statues, of gods and goddesses. Because of this, there is a heavy religious aspect to each choreography, in addition to the movement aspect of the piece. Just like any other dance, there are discrete movements and steps that, when sewed together, create the whole, continuous dance piece performed. Bharatanatyam pieces range from mostly just dance (or natyam), with little religious meaning, to an equal combination of both natyam and storytelling, to a narrative about a god or goddess that involves more lyrical and symbolic movements.

I started dancing when I was 5 years old and through the following 16 years, it became a huge part of my life and how I identified. I got closer to my Indian culture and learned stories and movements I would not have otherwise known. Now that I am in college, I dance a few times a year, not really learning any new choreography, but still performing the dance pieces I learned years ago.

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As you can imagine, learning any new dance, especially one that is not as common in your community (or country), can be challenging. Thankfully, through trial and error, and my teacher being extremely patient, I learned the new steps well and could do them automatically throughout the many dance pieces I learned and performed. Unfortunately, when I was 16 years old, I severely injured my knee and needed surgery. Obviously, this put a stop to my dancing, but because of the nature of my injury, I was in physical therapy for a full year trying to relearn how to move.

When I was physically able to dance, I had to relearn how to dance using the correct minute independent elements of my movements, or the correct degrees of freedom within each limb. Because of the life of my injury, I had been using the wrong minute degrees of freedom for some movements, even though I was using the correct coordinate structure as a whole. When it came down to specific muscles to control, I had to relearn how to move, which I did by trial and error and through Fitts and Posner’s three-stage model of learning.

I distinctly remember going through each stage of the three-stage model of learning post-op, constantly adjusting my body. During the cognitive stage, I was thinking critically of how I was physically performing the skeletal movements of each step, forgetting about the lyrical dance and movements I had once been doing. After a few months of practicing and relearning, the associative stage proved I was becoming more accurate and consistent with my movements overall. Now, 6 years since my surgery, I know I am in the autonomous stage, which thankfully allows me to pay little attention to the specific muscles I am using, and I can once again focus on other parts of the dance, such as emotion, to perform as I used to.

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Move my Arm like This... my Hand like... Wait What??

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Move my Arm like This... my Hand like... Wait What??

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Just as with any dance, there is a lot of coordination between limbs, the torso, the head, and eyes in order to dance beautifully. The fun part about Bharatanatyam is that each limb is always moving, and usually very quickly, making for a generally fast-moving type of dance. The speed of each movement can be challenging at times, partly due to the physical force needed, but also because I usually look worse when movements are fast, thanks to the truth of speed and accuracy trade-off. Usually, when I know a fast movement is coming up, I try to prepare my body to be fast an accurate. However, I more often than not end up performing an initial impulse phase where I just force my limb out there, and then fix errors of the movement during a control phase, using my proprioception feedback to adjust. All of this happens within the beat(s) allotted for the movement.

While all coordination of the body is extremely important in Bharatanatyam, the coordination that takes the most practice is definitely the coordination of asymmetrical bimanual movements. This is due to high interference because of the difficulty of each limb on its own, even though each limb makes discrete movements. Because the dances are performed to music, it is easier to make asymmetrical movements to the beat of the music, so there is less difficulty with temporal bimanual coordination. Unfortunately, it is harder to have movements be the prettiest and most accurate, because spatial biasing, or one limb’s movement being pulled toward the other limb’s movement, heavily affects these asymmetrical bimanual movements. Because of the natural desire to have bimanual movements be symmetric, it takes practice to make sure that each asymmetric movement is accurate. Usually, the limb with the movement that is more difficult is the one that pulls and hinders the easier movement of the other limb. In other words, it is natural to perform each asymmetric limb movement sloppy, but it is worth the practice of asymmetric limb movement to perform beautifully.

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Another Choreography about Krishna and Shiva

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Another Choreography about Krishna and Shiva

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Although Hinduism has thousands of deities that could potentially be the focus of a choreographed Bharatanatyam piece, there seem to be a few favorites that have more than one choreographed piece about them and their stories. For example, there are at least three separate dances that I have learned that surround Krishna, Shiva, and their relationship or stories involving them. As one might assume, when dancing about a god or goddess, one encompasses him or her and his or her distinguishing personality characteristics and physical features, which are shown through body position and movement and mudras, or hand movements and positions. For Krishna, this distinguisher is the peacock feather he wears on his head and his childish behavior; for Shiva, it is the crescent moon resting on the side of his head and his superior attitude. The distinguishers between Krishna and Shiva and every other god or goddess are how they are portrayed through the choreographies.

The way most Bharatanatyam pieces are choreographed is by having an introduction natyam section, a storytelling section, another natyam section, another storytelling section, etc., until the final, usually intense natyam section. Because there are multiple storytelling sections within one piece that could potentially be about the same god or goddess, it can be difficult to remember which characteristics to use to encompass him or her. It can be even harder to remember which sequence of distinguishing movements is for the new piece I am learning, and which sequence of distinguishing movements was for the piece I learned last year.

For example, one mudra or one movement defining Krishna can be preceded or succeeded by completely different defining movements of him in another piece. Therefore, proactive interference, or the interference of previously learned information interfering with the memory of new information, is quite common when learning certain choreography. The storage of certain characterizing sequences of movements in long-term memory interfere with the new, slightly different, sequences of movements that are being learned. In addition, in order to learn the new sequence of movements, it is necessary to break apart the procedural memory of the sequence into its discrete dance steps again. From there, a new sequence of discrete dance steps can be sewn together.

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[Side-note on how Bharatanatyam dancers position their legs the majority of the time: our legs are in a “diamond” shape, with our pelvis, turned out knees, and barefoot feet at the points. Our feet are flat and positioned outward so that our heels are touching and our feet are in line with our externally rotated legs. This is the “seated” position (because there is no other way to physically do this without bending at the legs and lowering slightly). The “full-seated” position of this is with the same leg position, but by folding our legs completely (still externally rotated) and lifting our heels so that all of our body weight is on the balls of our feet. I hope this is clearer to why my knee injury caused me to really relearn how to properly perform these movements… ]

Anyway, the elaborate costumes worn for Bharatanatyam performances involve an anklet of bells, or ghunghru, which make noise with movement. However, the anatomy of the bells is such that the two anklets on each limb can get caught and hooked together when we dance. Because our ankles are positioned together for only about half of the movements, it is necessary to separate them to perform the other half of the movements. This requires quick processing and decision-making of how to unhook the ghunghru.

The stages of information processing are conscious and important when this happens, because it only happens during a performance with an audience. First, there is the stimulus identification, or the sensory information being inputted that the ghunghru are hooked together. Second, there is the response selection, or deciding how to respond to the sensory information. In order to decide how to respond, we have to think ahead about what choreographed steps are coming next in the sequence of movements, to see if there is any way we can unhook the ghunghru. By thinking ahead, we learn the number of stimulus response alternatives, and hope there is more than “just reach down and unhook it manually”. Lastly, there is response programming, or actually unhooking the ghunghru while we are performing. This has to be organized and thought out, so that we can activate the correct muscles to perform a response while trying to look normal and keeping up with the choreographed movements.

P.S. Whatever Beyoncé is doing here looks exactly like how I feel trying to unhook my ghunghru under my costume!

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Whenever teaching us a new movement, whether it was for the upper or lower part of the body, my dance teacher always gave the example of the movement using her right side of the body. After trying to copy her, making mistakes, and slowly understanding the discrete movement she had just done, we would practice a few times. Once she saw that we had understood the movement enough to perform it accurately, she told us to do it with our left side. Miraculously, the movement performed on our left side was accurate a lot quicker than it had been on our right side. From practicing and thinking through the accurate performance of the movement on our right side, we were helping our left side’s performance.

Thinking through the performance allowed us to cognitively analyze what pattern of movements and muscles worked best for the movement at hand (or foot), which activated a movement pattern undiscriminating to the side of the body. This activation of the motor pattern, or selection of muscles for the movement, allowed for a positive transfer between our two limbs without conscious effort. The cognitive learning of strategies of how to most successfully perform the movement was used with both limbs, even by practicing and figuring it out with only one limb.