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 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

How South Indian Films Stole My Heart

It really all started with Devdas, the extravagant Hindi period piece that was my third Indian film viewing experience. One of the main things I noticed in it and other later Hindi films was the distinct, beautiful dance styles of the actresses. Hands gestured in certain ways and postures and movements were defined along a similar plane. I couldn't quite put my finger on it, and it took a while before I discovered the connection of filmi Indian dance with Classical Indian Dance.

I had never seen anything as beautiful and as mesmerizing as Classical Indian Dance. I still haven't. It's vocabulary of movement was unlike anything I had seen, and I couldn’t believe that modern choreographers in the US were not more familiar with these forms and all the wonderful motions they prescribed. The dances I watched intently were so grounded and earthy. Rows of bells/ghungroos on the feet added another dimension to the dance as artists, particularly in Kathak, created intricate aural soundscapes with only their feet!

Dance in its Indian incarnation was a whole body experience: matching the rhythm of the music with the feet, creating beautiful pure dance lines and geometric angles with the body, telling stories with the gestural language of the fingers and hands, communicating emotion with the eyes and face… stunning. The carnatic/hindustani musical accompaniment was obviously incredibly complex with its intricate meters and percussion. On top of that, the costumes and fabrics and temple jewelery were the most beautiful thing I’d laid eyes on, surpassing even Balinese dance. I wondered- how had I never seen these art forms before? Artists like Alarmel Valli, Nahid Siddiqui and Sujata Mohapatra blew me away. The theatrical world of Kathakali and other Malayalee dance forms could take a lifetime to study. I became so obsessed that I had an entire YouTube channel solely devoted to uploading recent and archival clips of famous exponents of the classical dance forms. Unfortunately, my channel later got shut down due to a copyright claim. I like to dream that it's still floating out in between some microchips somewhere...

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36 comments Anuj Mishra, Bhanupriya, Janaki Rangarajan