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November 27, 2009 Celebrating its tenth year, inDANCE, one of Canada's pioneering/progressive dance companies, proudly presents a duet adaptation of The King's Salon in India, following a critically acclaimed tour of Canada. Hari Krishnan and Srividya Natarajan, Canada's premiere Bharatanatyam couple, perform a full-length duet in Chennai on Thursday, December 24, 2009 at 7pm at Chandra Mandapa/Spaces, 1, Elliots Beach Road, Besant Nagar, Chennai. Love poetry has sustained the dance traditions of South India for the last four hundred years. The King's Salon is a celebration of the aesthetics of courtly love that are at the heart of the dance form called Bharatanatyam. During the reign of the Maratha kings of Tanjavur and local zamindars (landowning elites) in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, this dance was nurtured as a virtuosic art that was meant to stimulate aesthetic pleasure through the presentation of lyrical texts and movement. Courtly dance performances were given by women known as devadasis who were professional artists and courtesans. This tradition came to an end with the radical shifts in morality ushered in by colonialism and the rise of Indian nationalism in the twentieth century. The King's Salon reflects the research efforts of inDANCE with several distinct devadasi communities in South India. This repertoire reveals a remarkable continuity, and hopefully forces us to re-think the aesthetics of dance prior to the charting of state boundaries between these regions in the 1940s.
A Bharatanatyam performance by
Info: indance@gmail.com
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Hari
Krishnan & Srividya Natarajan present
Hari
Krishnan and Srividya Natarajan have also been invited to present
a lecture demonstration on 'The Kinetics of Guru Kittappa Pillai's Choreography'
on Saturday, December 26 at 9.30am at Krishna Gana Sabha
(20 Maharajapuram Santhanam Road, T.Nagar, Chennai) as part of the Natya
Kala Conference.