Kamala Dancing at the National Heritage Fellowships Concert September 2010!

Imagine my surprise when I discovered a video clip of a 76-year-old Kamala Lakshman giving a dance demonstration as one of the awardees at the 2010 NEA National Heritage Fellowships Concert in September!  The clip was linked to from the “News” section of the official website for Kamala’s current dance school in New York, Sri Bharata Kamalalaya.  Back in 2009, Richard did a great post about information found on the school’s website and rightly noted that it seemed to have not been updated in quite some time.  When I visited the website recently and found a new video clip, I had to share it here!

Starts 50:18

The segment honoring Kamala starts at 50:18.  She was one of nine recipients of the 2010 National Heritage Fellowship; according to the NEA website, the award is “intended to recognize the recipients’ artistic excellence and support their continuing contributions to our nation’s traditional arts heritage.”  Fellows receive $25,000 to recognize “individual artistic excellence and their efforts to conserve America’s many cultures for future generations.”  In an NEA interview, Kamala was pleased with her award and said “This is the best award.  It’s the greatest, greatest award of my life.”  Yay Kamala!

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4 comments Kamala, Rare Real-Life Footage

Rare Dance Songs of Kamala, Sai-Subbalakshmi, Padmini, and More!

I was beyond delighted to come across a number of seemingly-rare or hard to find dance songs from the 1950s and 60s featuring dances by Kamala Lakshman, Sai-Subbalakshmi, Padmini, Lalitha, Ragini, Vyjayanthimala, and a lovely duo whose identity I do not know.  Yay!  Without further ado, I present this fantastic little collection:

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17 comments Bharatanatyam, Kamala, Lalitha, Padmini, Practice Dance, Ragini, Sai-Subbulakshmi, Vyjayanthimala

Obscure Indian Films About Dance: My "Holy Grail" List

Throughout all of my research on classical dance in Indian films, I've come across a number of movies that I am fervently eager to see but appear to be nearly impossible to find due to lack of commercial release or limited print existence/distribution.  I've written out my list of "Holy Grail" films below with interesting tidbits and pictures, if available.  It's lovely to have them all in one place, and I hope to come back and edit this page as I find new ones.  My hope is that some kind soul will happen onto my blog and have a similar interest or know of where to obtain a copy.  The internet brings us all together, so let's band together and track these obscure films down! :)

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22 comments Sudha Chandran, Wishlist

Kinara (Hindi, 1977) is on YouTube! Hema Malini! Classical Dance!

For the past few days I've been working on a post about my "Holy Grail" classical dance films that seem to be commercially unavailable or obscure and hard to find.  Unfortunately, I hit control + Z to cut and paste an image and it deleted everything in my post.  Then, Blogger's insane autosave feature kicked in and saved the blank post.  And yes folks, it is impossible to revert to a previous version of a saved draft blogger post.  I checked.  So note to all my blogging friends out there using Blogger: Always back up your work! Do not press Control + Z EVER!!! *Minai ends fuming rant of fury*

While I go back and recreate my post, I thought I would post the most exciting news that some kind soul has uploaded the entire film Kinara with English subtitles!  I almost fell off my couch when I found it because word on the street for the longest time has been that this film is simply not commercially available.  I had figured that the few dance clips YouTube user tripmonk0 graciously posted would be the only bits I would be able to see of this film, ever.  Imagine my surprise when a quick search for Kinara images pulled up a result of the whole film!

The uploader pulled it off of an old VHS tape, so unfortunately the quality is not the greatest, and the subtitles are sort of in and out at times but allow you to get the gist of what's happening.

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9 comments Hema Malini, Kathak