Film Classical Dances of Lakshmi Gopalaswamy

Photo by Ragesh Vasudevan/Flickr

I'm going to stray from my usually-verbose manner and get straight to the point: Lakshmi Gopalaswamy is my favorite female filmi classical dancer of the current generation actively performing in films.  I think she is, quite simply, the best in terms of technical prowess!

In the 2000 and onwards world of film dance, we the classical-dance-loving audience have been left with little to delight in.  Certainly Vineeth has contributed some lovely performances, but what of the females?

Outside of the promising start of Manju Warrier (who gave a nice performance as the second dancer in this song from Thooval Kottaram but let marriage end her budding career), I've not been impressed with a single recurring female dancer in recent films until I saw Lakshmi's dances.

What I love about Lakshmi is that she is a trained Bharatanatyam dancer that actually transfers that training well to film.  It's refreshing to see someone with skill performing on screen.  Unfortunately, the dance choreography she's been given hasn't fully lived up to her potential for the most part.  More about her at the end of the post.

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10 comments Anuj Mishra, Bhanupriya, Bharatanatyam, Kannada, Lakshmi Gopalaswamy, Malayalam

Classical Dances in Kannada Films - Part 2

While Part One of my "Classical Dances in Kannada Films" series presented the best classical dance songs Kannada films have to offer, Part Two focuses on the rest: the bad, the obscure, and the missed opportunities!

Dreadful, Disastrous, and Dismaying!

Given that I usually focus on well-crafted classical-based dances in Indian films, I thought it would be delicious to revel in the dark side and present some pristine examples of dances that are, quite simply, terrible! It's often hard to pinpoint what makes them so bad... you just know it when you see it!

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6 comments Jayapradha, Kannada, Madhavi, Soundarya

Classical Dances in Kannada Films - Part 1

Subba Shastry DVD Cover

Throughout all of my posts on classical dance, one thing that has bothered me is the lack of representation from Kannada movies.  Tamil and Telugu films seem to dominate the landscape of filmi classical dance offerings with Malayalam films in a distant third likely due to Kerala's rich classical dance traditions.  But finding native Kannada films (not dubbings) with classical dance content has been difficult. 

There is a relative lack of information about Sandalwood (the Kannada film industry) online compared to other southern industries which means an outsider like me has put forth extra effort to unearth anything useful. When I first pondered why I had so few Kannada songs in my blog posts, I wondered if the film industry's obscurity relative to its southern counterparts had simply hidden songs from my view.  Or was it the industry's recent struggles compared to its earlier golden years?  I even started to wonder if Karnataka had less of an engrained classical dance tradition that would be reflected in film compared to, say, Tamil Nadu, but I suspect I'm ignorant on the subject. In any case, here's what I've been able to find about classical-inspired dances in Kannada cinema.

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9 comments Anuj Mishra, Bharatanatyam, Gopi Krishna, Kamala, Kannada, Kuchipudi, Lakshmi Gopalaswamy, Latha, Male Dance, Odissi, Sridhar, Yakshagana