Popular Culture: Dance and Music
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Popular Culture: Dance and music Dance has traditionally been an important part of religion and culture in India. According to Indian legend, the gods invented dance. Dancing is one of the most revered Hindu arts because it incorporates melody, drama, form and line. Gestures, body positions and head movements are emphasized in Indian dance. The use of the hands, fingers and eyes are of primary importance. There are almost a thousand specific hand movements and signs ( mudras). Often bells are worn around the ankles. The four abhinovas are essential to understanding Indian dance. They are 1) the technique of movement, which includes facial expressions, head movements and body movements; 2) all types of vocal and instrumental sounds linked with dance; 3) involuntary actions such as perspiration, trembling and blushing; and 4) make-up, costumes and sets. Some dancers are capable of changing their skin colour voluntarily by consciously pumping blood into the capillaries on the face. Gestures play an important role in India dance. Some dances feature more 600 gestures, each with specific meanings. They often have a codified meaning that is known to the audiences that watch the dances. It have been suggested the codified developed as way convey a single message by dance troupes travelling through areas where different languages are spoken or they developed out mnemonic devises used by storytellers to convey and remember their stories. Colours are also rich in symbolism and meaning. Heavy eye makeup is often worn to highlight the expressive of the eyes. Importance of Dance in India Nataraja (a depiction of Shiva) is the divine, cosmic dancer and a classic image in Indian art. He is often depicted in old bronze statues with four arms and one legged raised and the other crushing Apasmara, a dwarf-demon associated with confusion and ignorance. One hand assumes the gesture of protection, one points to a raised foot, one hold the drum that keeps the beat of the rhythm of creation. The forth holds the fire of dissolution. The ancient treatise on sculpture, the Silpashastra, offers a telling story about dance and art. In the old days a devout king from Vajra asked the sage Markandeya to teach him the art of sculpture. The sage handed the king a lump of metal and asked him, “Do you know how to paint? The king said he didn’t but he was ready to learn. The sage then said, “Do you know how to dance?” The king said he didn’t but he had a basic knowledge of instrumental music. The sage then told him to learn more about music and use that to understand dance better and with that knowledge advance up the scale to painting and the sculpture. It is no wonder also that dancers and gods associated with dancing are the subjects of some of India’s greatest works, the Chola sculptures. Dancers have traditionally been members of certain entertainer castes. They ranked low in the caste system and purity scale and supported themselves by working in travelling troupes or working for specific temples. It was not unusual for female temple dancers and troupe dancers to work as prostitutes. When the girls started leaving the temples to please local landlords a law was passed prohibiting the practice of dedicating girls to temples. To this day no mother in India wants her daughter to be dancer, because of its association with promiscuity. Dr. Jukka O. Miettinen of the Theatre Academy of Helsinki wrote: “The man who is regarded as being the first dancer to introduce the West to the “real” Indian dance tradition was Ram Gopal (1917–2003). In fact, his creations were only based on real Indian dance techniques, such as kathakali, bharatanatyam, and kathak, while the dance numbers themselves were mostly his own creations. Nonetheless, Ram Gopal was a remarkable dancer. He toured the world with his own company, for which he created short spectacular pieces. While they were based on Indian techniques he stripped them, at the same time, of their original costuming and make-up and gave them the fashionable “orientalistic” outlook, so popular in the West and by that time in India too. History of Indian Dance Dances performed in India are said to have their origins in dances and rituals of the period of the Vedas, which date back to around 1000 B.C. The earliest Indian religious texts describe creation in terms of dance. In Hindu mythology, a dance by Shiva creates and destroys the universe. Caves in the Vindhya Hill region of Madhya Pradesh are filled with images made by hunter-gatherers of dancers in a rich array of positions, many of them sexual. Dr. Jukka O. Miettinen of the Theatre Academy of Helsinki wrote: “The earliest known permanent settlements in India appeared approximately 9 000 years ago. They gradually developed into one of the earliest pre-urban civilisations in the world, the so-called Indus Valley Civilisation, which flourished in approx. 2700–1800 B.C. Its centres were Harappa and Mohenjo-Daro in the Indus River Valley, in present-day Pakistan. The Indus Culture had its own writing system, which has not yet been deciphered. Two small sculptures give some information about dance of the period. The oldest hard evidence of Indian dance are bas-relief depictions of dance found in Barhut, Sanhi and Amaravati, which date from the 2nd century B.C. to A.D. third century, and Natyashastra of Bharata, a treatise on drama and dance written between the A.D. 2nd and 4th century and sometimes referred to as the fifth Veda. Dance in India is guided by the elaborate codes in the Natyashastra and by mythology, legend and classical literature. Sculptures from all over India and from many different historical periods, many before A.D. 1000, illustrate the importance of dance in Indian cultural history and the richness of its traditions. Many classical forms of dancers are based on ancient sculptures. Dance is believed to have evolved from religious rituals and shamanist practices. Even today religious rituals often have drama and dance as elements in them. They are often associated with a particular Hindu god or a story or episode from the Ramayana and Mahabharata and are done n conjunction with music and art. Dr. Jukka O. Miettinen of the Theatre Academy of Helsinki wrote: “The man who is regarded as being the first dancer to introduce the West to the “real” Indian dance tradition was Ram Gopal (1917–2003). In fact, his creations were only based on real Indian dance techniques, such as kathakali, bharatanatyam, and kathak, while the dance numbers themselves were mostly his own creations. Nonetheless, Ram Gopal was a remarkable dancer. He toured the world with his own company, for which he created short spectacular pieces. While they were based on Indian techniques he stripped them, at the same time, of their original costuming and make-up and gave them the fashionable “orientalistic” outlook, so popular in the West and by that time in India too. Dance, Sculpture and Art in India Dr. Jukka O. Miettinen of the Theatre Academy of Helsinki wrote: “Besides the early literature, the visual arts, such as early sculptures, reliefs, and later paintings, also give extremely valuable information about theatre and dance. In India the whole phenomenon of the interrelation of dance and the visual arts and indeed of other art forms as well, is a most crucial one. The question is not merely of borrowing and exchanging materials and ideas from one art form to another. In Indian thought, dance, and all art, is basically a religious sacrifice (yajna). Art is also regarded as a form of yoga and a discipline (sadhana). Through the creation of a work of art the artist/craftsman strives to evoke a state of pure joy or bliss (ananda). “The human body was seen as a vehicle of worship and thus performances become acts of invoking the divine. By 200 AD at the latest, as stated above, the complicated techniques of dance-like acting, as well as the rasa system, were codified in the Natyashastra. It is significant that in the Indian tradition it is dance, a temporal and corporal form of art, which is regarded as the ascendant art form. It set the measure for other forms of art, since they adopted the theory rasa from the tradition of the Natyashastra. “Dance has been so predominant in its position that some textual sources stress that sculptors and painters cannot succeed in their work without a basic knowledge of it. The Natyashastra sets the physical and dramatic tools for evoking the rasa or the emotional state appropriate to worship. On the other hand, the Silpashastras, manuals of iconography and sculpture, were intended to help in producing the corresponding figurative representations. “Consequently, the principles of movement, however complicated they may be, are the same for both a dancer and a sculptor. The final goal of this intricate science of movements, measurements, poses, gestures etc. is to create the rasa, the actual object of presentation and, finally, to reach even further in evoking the state in which transcendental bliss can be experienced. Shiva, Religion and Dancing Gods in India Dr. Jukka O. Miettinen of the Theatre Academy of Helsinki wrote: “All the three Indian religions, Hinduism, Buddhism and Jainism, share the same theoretical basis for dance and the visual arts. And so most of the Margi or “classical” dance techniques, in spite of their local stylistic variations, bear strong similarities in all of these three traditions. Consequently, their imagery shares common aesthetic norms and iconographic features. As early as from the Vedic period (1600–550 B.C.) onwards, Indian literature and mythological narrative created characters which were depicted in the visual arts as dancing or in easily recognisable dance-derived poses, reflecting the prevalent dance techniques.