Apoorva Jayaraman is a Bharatanatyam artiste based in Chennai (India) with a multidimensional interest in the Indian classical arts.

 

===========================================================================================

VIDEO: Apoorva Jayaraman - dance at The Music Academy 2022

=============================================================================================

About Me

The Dance Story

Having serendipitously been introduced to Bharatanatyam at kindergarten, I started formally training in the dance form at the age of 5. It was not long before the engaging hobby transcended into a deep passion for the art form and began to deeply influence the way I steered my life.

Having serendipitously been introduced to Bharatanatyam at kindergarten, I started formally training in the dance form at the age of 5. It was not long before the engaging hobby transcended into a deep passion for the art form and began to deeply influence the way I steered my life.

At the age of 16, with 11 years of learning and 8 years of performing already behind me, I decided to shift base to Chennai (India) so that I could grow as a dancer under the guidance of greats like Guru Kalanidhi Narayanan. This move proved to be most valuable in my dance career, as I also had the great opportunity of coming under the tutelage of Priyadarsini Govind whom I have had the privilege to train under ever since.

Dancing, and activities surrounding it, have brought me a sense of fulfilment like nothing else so far has. Be it the exhilaration after a performance, the excitement of inspiring a child to dance, or the contentment of a good session of practice – dance has always been the one factor that has given me the greatest sense of satisfaction

=========================================================================================

Bharatanatyam as a secular art form

A Tale for All

My endeavour is to present Bharatanatyam as secular art-form accessible to everyone. To break the perception of Bharatanatyam as a religious art built to preserve religion, prevent it being relegated to the corner of cultural heritage or ethnic or oriental representative art form. I wish to present it as an art form of the present, of today - that stands as a product shaped by its cultural and ethnic history, yet absolutely not limited by it.

My work includes content from traditional repertoire and content from secular Indian literature spanning the ancient upto the modern. My effort is to present an original perspective of existing dance repertoire, while exploring a fuller scope of the art form by absorbing into the repertoire themes and ideas that interest me which include humanity – the emotional and transactional behaviour – and a look at the Universe and all its elements through a scientific lens.

==============================================================================================

Preserving timeless human stories

A Mirror to Humanity

Owing to its unbroken (although nebulous) history, Bharatanatyam tends to be identified as an ethnic art form. Therefore, it is natural to ask of it questions of relevance, that go beyond a preservational motivation. How is it relevant as a mode of expression to the next generation that does not live lives that are similar to what was lived 50 years back even in India.

Be it as a performer, or a teacher, I find it not only relevant but also a celebration of human voices over the ages to transfer the knowledge of this artform, along with form AND content. To me its not about personal stories, or about religion, or about even ethnicity. I look at it as timeless human stories of love, labour and war, which are universally human. This approach allows me to form that bridge with audiences worldwide, and more significantly with young people who are at the cusp of a serious engagement with this art form.

==============================================================================================

Gender Identity and Fluidity in Bharatanatyam

Embodying Gender

Art is successful only when the artist is able to abstract the essence of a thing, or a character, or a scene and present to you that abstraction – so one is not describing it, but being it. The task of portraying gender based themes through a performing art, especially so dance, cries out foremost for an intimate understanding of what is ‘maleness’ and what is ‘femaleness’. Can a certain set of characteristics – physical, emotional or psychological - be attributed to being male or female?

While traditional repertoire in Bharatanāṭyam itself has a wide variety of characters and voices of men and women available to be portrayed. I am personally excited by the possibility of exploring a finer understanding of gender, not in a purely academic and cerebral way, but also through the very body (which gives rise to the identity debate in the first place) and through a form like Bharatanatyam, which to me is an inherently gender neutral movement vocabulary.

The title of this page is inspired by Devdutt Pattanaik's book which adresses dignity in queer themes. At the same time it reflects my idea of the spiritual from within the secular

==================================================================================================

Conference

Navadhisha

2017

As young dancers today, we time and again find ourselves in situations where we are compelled to justify, stand up to, defend, qualify, apologise for the practise of dance. While the answers to these immediate questions is not of consequence, the question I ask myself as a young dancer is whether we are training the new minds in the business to be equipped to answer these questions – not for the world, but for themselves. The first edition of the Annual Dance Conference – Nava-dhisha – hosted by the Trinity Arts Festival of India, was envisioned as a space for young dancers to shape, express and exchange thoughts on this central idea, with steering inputs from senior experienced artists.

=============================================================================================

Research

The Role of Art in Knowledge Advancement

2018-present

This research project supported by a Junior Fellowship from the Ministry of Culture, Government of India, is based on the premise that the purpose and practice of the classical arts in the Indian sub-continent is fundamentally towards advancement of human knowledge. The key role of art towards this end lies in the training and sharpening of cognitive and intuitive skills. If this is indeed what the Indian performing arts are designed for at its core, could it fundamentally change the way we understand the social interface of our art forms? This is the main question that this project seeks to address.

===============================================================================================

Publications

Why do we Dance?

2018

Published in 2019, this book is a collection of 9 essays written by young dancers and scholars in the field of Bharatanatyam, based on talks given by them at the Inaugural Navadhisha - New Voices in Dance Conference held in December 2017. The essays reflect the voice of today's dancer, pondering over the central question 'Why do we dance'? Is dance even an essential activity of human life? What do we really mean when we use the term 'spiritual' to define the practise of Bharatanatyam, especially in the context of today's generation of dancers. What is the social relevance of the Indian dancer, and dance itself?

=====================================================================================================

Talks and Lectures

Riddle of the Languishing Nayika

2018, IDIA Conference, California

The pada varnam, which has come to be the centrepiece of the traditional Bharatanatyam repertoire, hinges on the Nayika. Contrary to the grand variety of situations in padams/javalis, the emancipated voices and the agency of the women we see in them, the Nayika of the pada varnam seems to be of a single kind. Every traditional varnam recurrently, and almost insistently, features a woman pining in love. She seems fragile, languishing in the ache of unsatiated love. From Saami Ninne Korinanu (18th century) to Innum en Manam (20th Century), the rhetoric is clear. “I seek you. Will you not pay heed? I suffer from the torment of separation. When will you come to me?” Surely, this persistent choice is telling us something.

======================================================================================================

Conference

Syntax and Semantics of Indian Classical Dance

2019,2018

The evolution of an art form is in the hands of its collective community – a combination of the practitioners, the academics and the patrons. Many of us dancers today grapple with the idea of presenting an expansive set of ideas and concepts through dance – including telling stories of today, telling non-traditional stories, representing present-day concerns etc. The immediate challenges we face with executing these ideas all converge at a basic question we are all asking – how do we do this while not tampering with the core spirit of the dance form? How do we do this while we in fact we are fully exploiting the grammar of the form and augmenting its distinguishing features. Can we come together for a productive exchange of ideas, thoughts and work to bring us collectively closer to some of these answers?

======================================================================================

Publications

Making Sense of the Nayika in Bharatanatyam

2019, Published first in the IFAASD Festival Souvenir

As Bharatanatyam reaches out to an increasingly global audience and student base, the question of relevance of the content we present arises often. The particular aspect that comes into scrutiny time and again is the Nayika in Bharatanatyam. While almost all dancers present these Nayikas, do we treat them and their stories as mere artefacts to be preserved for curiosity or can we see them as powerful voices that can resonate with and, even influence, today? As a dancer of today, it has been important to me to engage with the idea of the Nayika to rediscover its relevance for me, viewing it through the lens of my own environment and influences growing up.

======================================================================================

Talks and Lectures

Advaya - Beyond the Binary

2019, University of Bologna, Italy

There is a subtle, yet pervasive, treatment of gender fluid themes in the entire breadth of ancient Indian literature. The idea of ‘maleness’ and ‘femaleness’ is constantly challenged, without much ado, with negotiable boundaries of sexual and gender identities. This lecture-demonstration will look at how such multifold nuances of gender can be kept alive and relevant through the centuries by a performative medium such as Bharatanatyam.

==========================================================================================

Talks and Lectures

Spirituality in Indian Dance

2020, Music Academy, Chennai

I understand spirituality through Art, rather than the other way round. By redefining spirituality as a non-intellectual embodied experience of reality, I can comprehend the ‘exhilaration’ that I feel and in a way harvest it to further intensify the experience. Uniquely, art facilitates a transference of this experience to someone who walks into the auditorium with zero preparation, zero background or zero intent – which I think is extremely powerful. In this sense I feel, dance, its practice and its consumption, in themselves, become a gateway to spiritual experience regardless of faith, personal beliefs or content of presentation.

    END'

===============================================================================================