Workshop dance 1: Waterlily: Bharatnatyam (gryffindor)

Hello, and welcome to the Bharatnatyam Workshop.

Bharatnatyam is, in short, one of the oldest classical dances in India, originating from the State of Tamil Nadu.

The dance we will be doing in this workshop is short and uses quite simple steps, but the difficulty comes in the speed of the steps.

In Bharatnatyam, there are three main speeds. First is simply on the beat of the Mridangam drum, which is normally quite slow; Second is double of that speed, with two steps in each beat; Thirs is four steps in each beat. In western musical terms, this would be like a crotchet, quaver and semi-quaver.

The first thing that any and all Bharatnatyam students must learn is the key position that most of the steps are done in.

This is called Ayata, or Aramandi postion.

1) Place your heels together and move your toes outwards in a very wide "V" shape.

2) Create a gap of about a fist's length between your heels. As you advance in skill and become more experienced, you would slowly close this gap, which is there to help your balance, and widen your toes even more.

3) Bend your knees, so that a diamond shape is created with your legs.

This completes the posture, one of 10 main postures that you would use in Bharatnayam, coming from Mandala Bheda (the shloka which shows all ten body postures).

However, to get a good, graceful and correct posture, you must:

a) Keep your back straight.

b) Tighten your abdomenal muscles, keeping your tummy in and pulling on your centre of balance to keep yourself upright and enable you to dance with ease. Tightening these muscles also helps you control your arms and feet movements.

c) Keep your head up, shoulders relaxed.

d) This is most important. If your knees come forward and face the front, it spoils the whole posture. You MUST keep the open, wide and facing the side so your Aramandi position is correct.

Charmed walks into the class and tries to copy what waterlily says. when bending her knees, she falls to the floor through lack of balance!

"That's OK, no worries, on their first try, many people do that, but you just need to practise holding yourself up"

I shall recommend a few excersises to help you make your joints mor flexible if you need to, especially for the Aramandi Position

BUTTERFLY KNEES:

1) Sit down on the floor with your legs bent, but not crossed.

2) Hold onto your big toes and pull your feet in towards your groin as much as comfortably possible.

3) Make sure your soles of your feet are pressed together like you would make your hands in a praying position.

4) Slowly push you knees down until they are as close to the floor as you can get them.

5) Hold them there for about ten seconds and release. Repeat this about ten times, and then, to balance out the stretches, kneel; lift your right leg and put it around your left leg so your right foot is next to your hip; adjust your feet so you are comfortable and lean forwards to touch your nose to the floor. Repeat on the other side.

6) Keep doing this and your hip joint will be very flexible and you will have no problems with balance!

Emelia copies the elegant Waterlily infront of her. Slowly getting there, she looks at herself in the giant mirror infront, and laughs. Looking around nervously, she continues the stretches, slowly getting the hang of it :D

Jesse walked in realizing this was the place from his invitation and walked over finding a spot in the class to learn the dance~

~He watched as Waterlily started to explain and give examples of the dance she was teaching~

~He tried to do the steps but fell right on his face in an awkward position~
Oww...this is harder than I thought.." he mumbled.

::WL smiled serenely and helped jesse up again.

"Just practise and you'll get the hang of it"

~

Another exercise to improve the aramandi position is as follows. This excersise also strengthens and tones your thigh muscles, which is important, especially in long dances (1 hour +) when you have to sit in aramandi for the better part of the dance.

1) Open your feet and knees as you should in aramndi, but don't bend just yet.

2) Slowly, to an eight beat count, bend your knees into the aramandi position, and then into the full sitting position (Mandi).

You should reach aramandi at 4, and by the time you reach eight, you should be squatting fully on the floor - I won't refine your techinique on this position in this class, but just remeber to keep your back straight, tummy in and shoulders relaxed.

Next, we will move onto an adavu, and then the Namaskaram that everyone must do at the beginning of a dance. The dance we will learn consists of mainly the namaskaram, but we will also do some Abhinaya (acting/miming a story) after that.

Right, this step is called Sukra-Tirmaana Adavu.

It is actually quite a hard step to pick up, but try to do it, because once you have it, there are an infinite number of possibilities of how to put it into a dance.

The Sollukattu (what you say instead of counting beats, so you know where you're up to) is:

DHIT DHIT TAI --- (repeats as many times you want.)

The Hand Gestures (Mudras) involved are:

Pataka: Hands firm, flat, like in a karate chop position, thumbs bent in towards the palm.

Katakamukha: put your first and middle fingers together with your thumb and your last two fingers should be spread out, as far as you can get them.

Alapadma: spread all your fingers as wide possible. Bend your little finger down from the base as far as you can get it without help, and the rest of the fingers will automatically adjust themselves because of that movement.

Practise these hand movements until your fingers get stronger, then we will move onto the actual steps.