Mallika's dance at Tandav
Your dance at Tandav was very, very nice and vastly improved in many ways.
Your positioning looks excellent, though it seemed you are trying too hard with your face. Go back to your classes at Blue Lake and remember sense memory acting... we have to find some sense memory that will trigger the right responses for nritta, so your basic expressions yield the excitement that your storytelling gives us.
If you relax and give yourself as an instrument to the divine, as you often do... you will feel the pure connectivity, and you will not need to compete to prove yourself, because at that point you will laugh out loud with the realization that there is no self for competition to exist.
Remember, these dance positions are atoms and molecules being put to work in certain sacred geometric shapes, while the heating and unheating of your body as you move, cause your molecular composition to take on other chemical reactions with your universe... sharing, in effect, your self with your surroundings - so how do you compete with another when you are them? Which brings me to the topic that dance always raises in my soul... is God the largest thing or the smallest thing in the universe? From the descriptions given, He would be within and all around outside us... the only thing that does that is a tiny quark within every molecule that exists. That means the swarms of molecules that work in unison to create matter from nothing dance to become us as long as we think we exist... and if reality is a hologram, then each part of our cells reflect the whole universe as it exists... sort of like if a mirror broke, all the little shards, still reflect a whole you. That's the key to how DNA works, anyway.
A lot to think about, I know. Why do I raise physics when I speak about dance? I feel that all the myths, and the precision of the steps we take all point to this dance being some kind of a key to an outside universal force.
I mean, listen to the story of Siva's earring, which i raised in the Tandav recital, when the earring fell: When Siva danced, his earring fell and as it hit the earth 4 times, it made the original rhythms of music - Ta dit tom and num. Then as he raised it from the ground with his toe, he lifted the foot to reach the earring to his hand and replaced it on his ear, melting his hand back to pataka in the abhayam position. That is the origin of Siva's nataraja pose.
Why is it that in Ancient India, Ancient Greece and Ancient Egypt - art, dance and music were regarded with such precision? In India, some things are still "right" and "wrong" with regard to dance. How is such a subjective thing given such rules to live by? My argument is that aesthetics is clearly linked to precise geometric shapes, the same ones reflected in a sliced sound wave, or in a snowflake or in a drop of water as it responds to its surroundings, or in a heartbeat, or in a leaf or tree trunk... these are all universal sacred shapes, so Sadir or Bharata Natyam, the dancer can find herself in a trance if she stops thinking about the rules, but lets go so the shapes can automatically occur.
Good luck... Balance your practice with meditation now. See you soon.
posted by Vidya @ 12:54 PM
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