“To us, she is like God," says Meghna Rao (no relation), who dances in the Stem Dance Kampni, a contemporary dance company founded and run by Madhu Nataraj.Ĭertain art forms are more connected with a country’s culture than others. But she shows up to watch the six-year-olds dance, and this is the other reason why Maya Rao is viewed as a legend in dance circles-she has trained over 3,000 students. Rao does not know me and would not recognize me from the throngs of other parents who videotape beginner Kathak performances at the ADA Rangamandira in Bangalore, where she usually sits in front and observes the proceedings. I have visited it because my daughter is a student of a student of Maya Rao’s. It is a beautiful building in the heart of Malleswaram. The school was inaugurated by the great Kamaladevi Chattopadhyay in 1987 and renamed the Natya Institute of Kathak and Choreography. As her book describes, she was based in New Delhi until former Karnataka chief minister, Ramakrishna Hegde invited her to come and set up a dance school in Bangalore. If you ask people why Maya Rao is great, they will tell you one line: She brought Kathak to south India. It isn’t the Dharwad-Hubli region, which is truly the place in Karnataka where Karnataka sangeetham meets Hindustani sangeet (difference in pronunciation intentional), but Bangalore is Dharwad-lite. Here, people know and accept both streams. I didn’t have a clue about Hindustani music or Kathak, for instance, until very recently. In that sense, my childhood was very parochial in terms of the arts. But there was no sense for, or desire to learn, the other Indian art forms that were out there. We knew the idiom, the gestures, and the music. The milieu I grew up in was suffused with Carnatic music and Bharatanatyam. In Chennai, and I dare say, in many parts of north India, the music and dance that you listen to and watch are very specific. Then there was Maya Rao, 86, resplendent in a red Kanjivaram sari (or was it a Molakalmuru silk picked out by Rangachar?), smiling. Madhu Nataraj, Rao’s daughter, choreographed the evening with precision and flair.
Three people read excerpts from the book: author Vikram Sampath, singer Tara Kini, and media professional Sandhya Mendonca.
There was the Kannada movie star and politician, Anant Nag, who said amid much laughter that he had never danced in any of his movies but his daughter was a student of Rao’s. In response, Rao playfully talked about watching Karnad dance while the music was being played. There was Vimala Rangachar, who headed the Crafts Council of Karnataka, in a rare shimmering Patola sari Girish Karnad, who spoke about hiring Rao, or Maya Didi as she prefers to be known, to choreograph his film that ended up not getting made. The story revolves around a young dancer’s dream of setting up a dance academy, a reflection of Shankar’s own academy, which he founded at Almora. It starred Uday Shankar and his wife Amala Shankar as leads and 17-year-old actress Padmini, making her screen debut.Kalpana was the first film to present an Indian classical dancer in the leading role, and was entirely shot as a dance ballet and a fantasy.At last week’s book release function of Maya Rao: A Lifetime In Choreography, held at the ITC Windsor, Bangalore, the stars were all in attendance.
Kalpana is a 1948 Hindi film featuring a dance-drama, written and directed by noted dancer, Uday Shankar. Let’s see some of the well-known main stream dance movies with social contexts as follows. These movies cover from caste system politics in performing arts to Devadasi traditions, gender roles of a dancer to dancer’s struggle, non-inclination towards Indian art form to challenges life put for pursuing art. However, today we pick some of the Indian Movies from different languages which with Indian dance articulated new reforms, stigmas associated with societies.
There were many movies being made on dance some were subjected and in some dance was just sourced to give bounty points for the heroine’s characters.
However, as the time faded dance movies slightly moved away from the silver screen. We can see classical dance was an essential part of every late era films, and dancers cum actors like Vaijanatimala Bali and Padmini were the torch bearers of dance in movies.
Movies are made with true inspirations, stories and are great source to motivate. Classical dance in movies was always played an integral part.