“It was a dark hall, with only the stage brightly lit. A beautiful dancer was talking to Krishna. Something stirred inside me. Instantly I turned to my father and said I too wanted to talk to Krishna. He smiled and said that I would have to learn the dance first from the teachers and musicians sitting on the side of the stage,” recalls Kanaka Srinivasan, a Padma Shri award winner.
She trained herself in the Vazhuvoor baani (school) from guru Ramaiah Pillai. And adds that she is so “grateful for he chose to be my guru”.
Kanaka goes back in time to narrate how she started dancing. “I can’t remember the age at which I started learning except that I was small enough to be wearing a frock! I didn’t even know it was called Bharatanatya!,” laughs the dancer, who was in Bangalore recently to conduct a workshop at the Iyengar Centre For Fine Arts, Malleswaram, started by Seshadri Iyengar.
Talking about the Vazhuvoor baani, Kanaka says that “Bharatanatya is popular because of my guru. He is the one who established this baani. His birth place is Vazhuvoor in Tanjore. The specialty of this style is that it includes leaps and jumps, the abhinaya is subtle. Any dancer from this style has to be agile and light footed. The other feature is the eye movement. We don’t blindly follow our hands but make eye contact with the audience. It’s like giving a look after a complicated jathi that tells them ‘I have done it’.”
Today she travels around teaching younger dancers all that she “imbibed from my guru. But, life has changed so much. As children, we learnt watching the moon, the birds and so on . But, today technology has swept into every field. Even dance. They learn from YouTube and Skype instead of a guru.”
The journey of learning from her guru is a significant part of her memory. “He was so busy those days. Each time I went to learn from him he would ask me to come back after a few more days or weeks. One day he was in a relaxed mood and told me to come back on Vijayadashami day to start learning. I was so excited that I remember skipping and jumping all the way home.”
Kanaka gives all the credit to her guru and her parents, who she says encouraged her to become a performer. She adds that the only challenge she faced was to “outshine the other students in my class.”
She recalls the day she saw the arangetram of a senior student while she was still beginning her journey in dance. “Her performance moved me to tears. Everything about the way she walked, danced, her abhinaya and her presentation of the adavus -- all made me cry. That was how I wanted to dance. Dance for me became a spiritual journey.”
“We did not wait for applause. If I danced well, then I was satisfied. But today they want to be applauded. The more shows you have the more famous you are.”
She says that teaching is also a learning experience. “You learn to give every part of your own knowledge to another. And every student interprets dance in a different way. So you learn from them as well. You have to be careful as some dancers can’t do complicated adavus. So you change the dance moves to her ability.”
Then she sits down to show us a demonstration of an abhinaya. Her tiny performance, her abhinaya and her involvement did move us to tears, which is such a rarity in these days.
