Mahalakshmi Prabhakar and Aranyani Bhargav

This Foundation Project implemented by IFA under Arts Platforms will curate a series of 12 to 15 sessions of discussion on the online platform titled Re-Cognising Dance.  Mahalakshmi Prabhakar and Aranyani Bhargav will be the Coordinators for this project. 

Both Mahalakshmi and Aranyani are practitioners of Bharatanatyam, with a deep interest in the history of performance and theory that informs the practice. Mahalakshmi has trained in Bharatanatyam under Lavanya Shankar.  She was recently awarded a research grant by Parivartan, for her work in dance education. She has given talks on dance in several national and international platforms. Aranyani has been trained in Bharatanatyam by Leela Samson. She has performed extensively as part of dance ensembles and as a soloist. In 2014, she founded an exploratory Bharatanatyam company called Vyuti. She is the recipient of the Natya Kala Mani award for her contributions to the field of dance. Given both their experiences, they are best placed to be the Coordinators of this Foundation Project of IFA.

The motivation for this project springs from a felt need for constructive dialogue around the complex history of dance as well as the contemporary issues around the current practice and performance of Bharatanatyam. Mahalakshmi and Aranyani feel that the recent debates and discussions around Bharatanatyam are becoming increasingly polarised, and the discourses are being limited to reductive binaries that are often created on the basis of identity and privilege. Propelled by this, and the need to create a healthy and safe space for building dance scholarship in India, Mahalakshmi and Aranyani started a Facebook platform called Re-Cognising Dance in August 2020. Over the past 16 months, this Facebook page has hosted engaging discussions and reading sessions led by senior dance scholars and practitioners from across the world. While the primary focus of the platform has been Bharatanatyam, there have also been discussions on other classical dance forms. Re-Cognising Dance has been steadily growing to become a democratic social media space for intellectual growth, stimulation and mutual understanding on issues concerning dance. It has been bringing people together for learning, exchange of knowledge, thoughts and ideas, and possible collaborations between artists from diverse backgrounds.  

The current project aims to further energise Re-Cognising Dance and help build robust and stimulating conversations on marginalised themes in Indian dance. It seeks to bridge the classical-folk divide and provide access to resources, scholars and mentors in the field of dance. 

In its present form, Re-Cognising Dance includes various series of discussions, reading groups and workshops for children. As part of this Foundation project, IFA will implement 12 to 15 curated discussion sessions under two series titled Scholar and Discouraged. In the series titled Scholar intense interactions take place between the speaker and the participants on topics that have hitherto not been discussed by the Indian dance community or those that have received little attention. In the series titled Discouraged a panel of four to six speakers is put together and participants are encouraged to go into a freewheeling discussion on various topics of interest and concern. The speakers/ panelists for these series will be chosen keeping in mind not just knowledge and expertise but also diversity of backgrounds and expressions.

While both the series will mostly be in English to accommodate a common language for participants from across the country, the project will remain open to possibilities of bringing in other languages into these discussions. Besides Bharatanatyam, the series will encompass discussions and conversations around other forms of dance such as Manipuri, Sattriya, Kuchipudi and those that are problematically categorised as ‘folk’. All sessions will take place on Zoom for registered participants and will be available for public viewing on Facebook and YouTube. 

At the end of the project, the Coordinators will create a website where all this material will be collated, organised and made easily accessible. It will also have a consolidated database of textual and audio-visual material. Some recorded events would be available for viewing at a nominal fee. 

This project suitably addresses the broad framework of IFA’s Arts Practice programme and the Arts Platforms category in particular, in the manner in which it seeks to nurture nuanced conversations in dance, bridges gaps between practice and scholarship, creates nurturing networks and makes dance scholarship widely accessible.   

IFA will ensure that the implementation of this project happens in a timely manner and funds expended are accounted for. IFA will also review the progress of the project at midterm and document it through an Implementation Memorandum. After the project is finished and all deliverables are submitted, IFA will put together a Final Evaluation to share with Trustees.

This project is supported by Sony Pictures Entertainment Fund.