Tradition in the Education of the Future The Bharatanatyam Story
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thank you all
it’s wonderful to be here when we think
about the education of the future the
conversation
always centers on the digital world
technology and innovations that can
replace
age-old models of thinking but what if i
told you
that the education of the future
incorporating tradition would be one of
the most progressive moves that we could
make as a society
let’s start with the example of movement
as children we are expected to crawl and
then walk
and eventually run all of this is
genetically encoded in our experience
when we think about movement to me
the most primal extension of the
function of movement
is to dance when we codify and
politicize something as
complex as dance however the story gets
complicated
and to be honest with you i had no sense
of how complicated this story was
at all i grew up in a white jewish
neighborhood
on long island in new york with very
limited knowledge of indian movement
systems
luckily i come from a very illustrious
musical family
and pictured here is my great aunt who
retired as the principal of the mysore
music college
i was surrounded by music and dance in
my household
and my mother would drag me to dance
classes on the weekend
much against my will i used to ask her
why it is that i have to go to dance
class and she said something to me which
i found confusing she said
we need to preserve our tradition
what does tradition mean ama i used to
ask her
and she chuckled at me and say that when
i was older i would understand
well soon i became older and contrary to
her promises i still had no idea what
tradition meant
but luckily i fell in love with the art
of dancing
and at the impressionable age of 19 i
decided to leave everything i had ever
known in the united states
to move to india to pursue my quest
for the meaning of tradition in indian
art
the second i landed here everyone had a
book recommendation for me
manuscripts texts sometimes textbooks
that were six inches thick
books upon books upon books of the
oldest
texts written about indian art
and each of these texts full of codes
prescriptive rules do this don’t do that
this building isn’t complete without
this figure and that palace isn’t
complete without that one
unless you hold your hand at the exact
position that it’s supposed to be held
the entire pose is not accurate
how did i make sense of these codes
mathematics time cycles
measurement systems even the placement
of a sculpture’s
navel was as important
as the movement of a dancer’s lower lip
and all of these codes written in
sanskrit
a language exclusive to the brahman
community
for five years after i discovered these
texts
i tried to read everything i could find
the ngati sastra
the shilpa sastras the puranas
and after five years after
learning as much as i could i decided to
go
out into the world and find a real life
art practitioner
to confirm all the knowledge i had read
in these books
the first person i confronted or the
first person i met
was nephew of ace architect
and legend in the sculptor community mr
dakshina
i walked into his office quite
confidently having a printed list of
technical questions about the shilpa
shastras
he took one look at me and said
we don’t use those shilpa sastras
my jaw dropped to the floor he continued
we used the stapatia veda which was
written by
our ancestors of the viswakarma
community
not the brahmin community and passed
down orally
from one generation to the next in fact
we keep the book of the stapatia veda
in our puja room and we worship it
so i kind of peered at him and i said
but how do you build such beautiful
temples
and within a second he whipped out a
piece
of white paper and on that piece of
paper he began
muttering his ganapati dhyana shloka and
in a second before me appeared this
beautiful image
of a ganapathi sculpture or a sketch for
a ganapati sculpture rather
he tried to explain to me that
the crux of understanding the sapatya
veda
understanding the craft of being
astapati was to use
your finger length and use the length of
your hand
as a measurement system now
this is an a highly individualized sort
of an art form
the next person i went to meet was
someone who is a legend in her own right
she’s the last
living dancer associated with the temple
tradition of pudukote
muthukanamal mudukana malpati
is the woman that i want to be when i
grow up
she has a big round bindi infectious
energy
laughter that’s contagious and a
swagger in her step that i could not
manage
at 32. forget 82.
muthukana malpati was someone who i
approached because i wanted to
understand the origins
of the bharatanatyam tradition all the
people that i had met told me to read
all these texts and i had memorized all
these videogas and i went to her and i
said
patty i need help i’m trying to show
this one particular
mudra this one particular gesture to
depict a concept
she laughed at me and she said why are
you making it so complicated
it’s quite simple and within a second
she solved my problem
thousands of hours of reading had
nothing on hundreds of years of
embodied temple dance tradition
so this presents us with the age-old
dichotomy that appears in
all the fields that we know of which is
the dichotomy
between theory and practice
the dichotomy between the people who
make knowledge
and then the people who apply that
knowledge to the field
scientists versus engineers historians
versus conservators the list goes on and
on
and on and what do we learn from this
dichotomy
on one hand we see the brahmanical
tradition of
text it’s a detailed handbook
it’s a guidebook that’s precise and
thorough to
fault but on the other hand
you have the tradition of the artisans
of the courtesans of the stapathies it’s
practical it’s malleable it’s adaptable
to suit the moment
what the codes lack in soul
the artisans make up for in self-assured
swagger they are the tradition
and this brings us to
really understanding tradition
and the hunt for tradition so going back
to my story
i’m really happy to report after
almost two decades of searching for the
truth
in the presence of my mother who’s here
at the auditorium this evening
i would like to define for you what i
understand is tradition
tradition is intangible it is embodied
it is ephemeral but it adds to education
a perspective
that often we lack
tradition is important
because we must teach the traditional
way
if only to expedite the need to deviate
from it
take for example the the art of birth
nation
tradition is an adjective that we use
and overuse so many times
because we feel like bharatnatyam is a
form that is
museumized that is kept in stone
well the dance that we danced today that
we called bharthanatyam
i’m surprised to report is probably no
more than
55 to 100 years old
we use codes that were developed much
earlier
but basically the core of tradition is
change
and so i encourage you all
to think about history
as a living thing
don’t trap history or tradition in an
abstract glass cage
talk to it fight with it
play with it and if you’re brave enough
question it
wrestle with the complexity question the
stereotypes
read the narratives in a way that is
different than
everyone else and find your own truth
today i present to you a dance piece
that has resulted from this tradition of
questioning
and this dance piece questions the great
iconic
figure of krishna himself
and three women of three different age
groups
are talking to krishna asking him to
marry her
and her alone so let’s see what krishna
says at the end
thank you
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