For all those aspiring dancers who are into physical training and Yoga to keep themselves fit for stage shows, senior dancer Mandakini Trivedi’s talk on dance and Yoga came to be an eye-opener. Among the series of Yoga-related programmes of Sangeet Natak Akademi at Meghdoot, the Mohinattam dancer’s views culled from Natya Shastra and based on other related treatises on dance were propped by a power point presentation and a demo that underlined the physiology and geometrical dimensions of dance and Yoga.
Defining art on two levels, the speaker made it clear that art is empirical (“loukik” ) as in the West where it is stylised to express socio-political-economic dimensions of the world around us and in the process serve as a tool for entertainment. The vision of classical Indian art like music and dance is transcendental (“aloukik”). Dance is parallel to Yoga which is yoking the mind and body to reach the third highest state of awareness. The spiritual dimension of Yoga gets crystallised when translated into form (i.e. classical dance) and transmits higher energies to individual to transcend into higher realm.
Mandakini lucidly talked about the three levels and the three elements that are vital and constitute Indian dance: aesthetic, symbolic and Yogic with the corresponding elements of form, theme and experience. She demonstrated with a Naman mudra or Anjali (Namaskar) which is the joining of two palms facing each other, symbolic of the positive and negative in universe which conjointly makes a neutralised mudra at the heart centre (anahata chakra) the ‘I’ consciousness from where the rise upwards begins. The narrative of any mythological story forms the aesthetic basis (form) from where symbolic emerges finally culminating in the Yogic. To underline this point the dancer brought out the multiple narration in the story of Shiva and Shakti that is to be identified at all the three levels, which was very educative. Nritya or dance has a vocabulary, grammar and language through which a system of design is created and a technique evolved and all these factors are conduced to beauty. The symbolic level is also the catharsis of human experience resulting in the final level of bliss or rasa and this is the state of Yoga.
Reiterating the tangible, perceptible world view by the great masters Mandakini linked it to the concept of dance movement with commendable clarity. She expounded the primal concept of the universe in a nutshell, wherein, only consciousness permeated represented by a dot (bindu) which is seen as the origin of design. This consciousness desired to manifest and express itself through time and space wherein there figured the five elements each with a design for instance earth by a vertical line going downwards; wind by a diagonal line, water by a horizontal line to indicate its flow, sky by a upward vertical line and finally ether by the seamless and intangible. These elements contained the three qualities (guna) of high, middle and low called Satwa, Rajas and Tamas respectively. Hence the postures, positions and movement of dance is conceptualised and built around this time and space. For the West, time is linear but in Indian context time is circular and changing while space is static and square. The supreme consciousness is absolute and conflict-free.
Cosmic design
The cosmic mandala (design) is envisaged in the human body in Natya Shastra wherein the movement is inward from outward akin to the Yogic journey. The tala or rhythm for dance is cyclic while the spine of the dancer is the fireline, the naval being the core and the dance begins from this region where four principle nadi (vein) of the body reside—two above the naval and two below. These in turn branch out into 24 which re-branch into many tiny nadi making for 72,000 nadi in the human body. “Our classical dance is all about forming squares and interlacing triangles replicating the Cosmic mandala which is within us and in the process being able to transcend the mundane and seek oneness with super consciousness.”
Abhinaya (mime) builds in this space using it symbolically to express the core philosophy of dance. “The outer grid connects to the Cosmic grid and as Abhinava Gupta says, ‘Karna is a kriya’,” states Mandakini concluding with a crisp abhinaya and footwork in Mohiniattam to the Vedic verse “Poorna Madah, Poorna Midam...” that underlines perfection as the sole and unique quality of Nature.
