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Books > Arts & Architecture > Performing arts > Dance > Folk dancing
The Ramayana, one of the two pre-eminent Hindu epics, has played a
foundational role in many aspects of India's arts and social norms.
For centuries, people learned this narrative by watching,
listening, and participating in enactments of it. Although the
Ramayana's first extant telling in Sanskrit dates back to ancient
times, the story has continued to be retold and rethought through
the centuries in many of India's regional languages, such as Hindi,
Tamil, and Bengali. The narrative has provided the basis for
enactments of its episodes in recitation, musical renditions,
dance, and avant-garde performances. This volume introduces
non-specialists to the Ramayana's major themes and complexities, as
well as to the highly nuanced terms in Indian languages used to
represent theater and performance. Two introductions orient readers
to the history of Ramayana texts by Tulsidas, Valmiki, Kamban,
Sankaradeva, and others, as well as to the dramaturgy and
aesthetics of their enactments. The contributed essays provide
context-specific analyses of diverse Ramayana performance
traditions and the narratives from which they draw. The essays are
clustered around the shared themes of the politics of caste and
gender; the representation of the anti-hero; contemporary
re-interpretations of traditional narratives; and the presence of
Ramayana discourse in daily life.
Dance in India has been deemed sacred because of its innate
capacity to visualise and actualise the deepest philosophical
concepts through gestures, movements and the art of suggestion.
Immediate collective transcendence is possible only through dance
when the dancer disappears and melts away in the dance and when the
audience is transported to the realm of 'rasa srishti', the pure
aesthetic delight. Any attempt to transcribe and describe dance
through words is bound to remain incomplete as dance is a visual
art. In India it has sat atop a pyramid of various art forms which
have had an oral and written history. As dance in India freely uses
literary and poetic works taken from all vernacular languages, its
repertory is rich beyond imagination. Vocal and instrumental music
provides a constant accompaniment to translate ideas contained in
these literary texts. Profusion of intricately carved sculptures on
temple-walls have kept the forms alive even through dark periods of
unsympathetic foreign rule. Dance has inspired a wealth of stone,
metal and wood carvings, frescoes, murals and miniature paintings
as well as textiles reflecting a panorama of dance movements.
Special ornaments in gold, ruby, emerald, diamond or silver used by
dancers have had a tradition of being crafted by hand. The art of
decorating hair with different kinds of arrangements of flowers and
fragrant leaves according to seasonal availability and suitability
was specially taught as an additional accomplishment of a dancer.
This book points at many such ideas and urges the reader to take a
plunge in the ocean of ambrosial knowledge, which is called 'natya
vidya'.
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