research paper on kathak dance

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11 The Sound of MovementHearing Kathak Dance

Monica Dalidowicz, Independent Scholar

• Published: 20 October 2022
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This chapter undertakes a phenomenological investigation of the musicking and moving body that examines how North Indian kathak dancers apprehend sound through movement and simultaneously perceive movement through sound. While our senses can be described empirically as discrete entities, phenomenologically speaking, this is not how we experience the world. It is this entangled and undifferentiated aspect of sensory experience that is explored here through an ethnographic description of the teaching and learning of kathak dance. Kathak dancers are in fact musicians producing complex rhythmic patterns through vocal rhythms and the sound of their bare feet slapping rhythmically on the floor. Learning how to hear dance is a vital part of the process of sensory enskillment that occurs in the learning of this art form.

This chapter originates out of an effort to comprehend how we perceive and experience our moving bodies through sound. As a dancer, the centrality of movement to the experience of the body is self-evident: we experience our bodies moving in place and between places, directed in and toward our material environment. Phenomenologist Maxine Sheets-Johnstone explains that the quintessential relationship between the body and the world “is through and through kinetic from infancy onward” ( 1999 , 361). But one could similarly add that our relationship to the world is through and through a sonic one. How do bodies sound? How does sound orient our bodies to movement and the environment we inhabit? Sound guides our attention toward objects, surfaces, and aspects of the environment; we are prompted through auditory cues to move toward or away, to move slowly or quickly and with differing qualities of movement (forcefully, lightly, and so forth), and much of this happens without our explicit focus. Moving bodies themselves have an auditory dimension; sounds are created as the body interacts with the material world. Not only can we hear ourselves speak but we can tune into the way our bodies sound as we move (e.g., the sound of our feet as we walk). The nature of the North Indian dance form of kathak provides an important site for the exploration of these themes: dancers are in fact musicians producing complex rhythms through the sound of their feet. This is more than simply moving to the music but rather an experience of creating sound through the movements of the body.

The auditory dimension of experience has been a focal point for ethnomusicologists and a growing range of interdisciplinary academics, many of whom have explored the ways humans experience and interpret sound (see Ihde 1976 ; Feld 1996 ; Clayton 2008 ). But how does sound relate to our kinesthetic orientation to the world? For musicians, movement itself is primarily expressed in sonic form: the production of music is an embodied act in which an intimate tactile and kinetic relationship with the world brings forth sounds that can be taken as musically meaningful. Ethnomusicologist Matthew Rahaim (2012) has highlighted the way music is also a kind of motion through his study of the gestures of the hands and upper body that Hindustani classical singers make while performing. In dance, however, the auditory nature of corporeality often recedes to the background; in the Western academy, the study of dance movement has typically focused on its expression within the visual field. However, in the North Indian style of kathak, learning how to hear dance has primacy: the music-making body is a key focus. Movement intends to be expressed in both the visual and sonic fields. It is not only the quality of movement that defines kathak but also the quality of the rhythmic sound that the dancers produce as their feet rhythmically slap on the floor that becomes foremost in the dancers’ orientation to their world. Further, bodily movements have a sonic equivalent and are first vocalized as mnemonic syllables, known as bols , which are then later expressed in movement. Kathak dance, like other Hindustani (North Indian) and Carnatic (South Indian) musical traditions, relies on a syllabic language of bols for its transmission. From the outset, kathak dance gesture involves an important sonic dimension: movement is first apprehended as sound, not as a visual representation to be mimicked. As I will explore, the deep association between the vocalized sound and the movement of the body means that sound and movement often emerge in the mind and body as the same phenomenon for the dancer. Kathak performance is grounded in forms of embodied motion, which are fundamentally intersensorial and which transcend the boundary between the sonic and the gestural. In this chapter, I undertake a phenomenological investigation of the musicking and moving body that examines how kathak dancers apprehend sound through movement and simultaneously perceive movement through sound. While our senses can be described empirically as discrete entities, phenomenologically speaking, this is not how we experience the world. It is this entangled and undifferentiated aspect of sensory experience that I explore here through an ethnographic description of the teaching and learning of North Indian kathak dance.

Central to this investigation is the phenomenological assumption that the moving body is foundational to our experience of the world. Following the work of Maurice Merleau-Ponty, I place the sensing, perceiving, and moving body at the center of my research and draw on his basic idea that the “lived body” is the means by which we have a world ( [1945] 1962 ). As perceiving subjects, our focal attention moves in and toward certain aspects of the environment as we navigate the world from day to day. As dancers, we learn to home in on certain aspects of experience, to train and retrain the way we relate to the world, whether that is discovering how our foot feels and sounds as it slaps on the floor, finding our center of gravity and maintaining balance as we learn to take kathak pirouettes, known as chakkar s, or developing a deep intuition for musical time as it frames the entire experience of the dance. We learn to tune in and are guided to focus on certain zones of perception that may typically remain beyond our explicit awareness; what I see or hear at any given moment is established in part because of the occlusion of other elements of the visual, auditory, and tactile fields. 1 Much as dancers can focus on one aspect of their training, my analysis follows in a similar fashion: I focus on the sonic dimension of experience in this chapter in order to illuminate the experiential, audible quality of the moving body that is often overlooked but nevertheless constitutes part of the holistic experience of being-in-the-world for a kathak dancer. Following the work of Don Ihde, “this deliberate change of emphasis from the visual to the auditory dimension at first symbolizes a hope to find material for a recovery of the richness of primary experience that is now forgotten or covered over in the too tightly interpreted visualist traditions” ( 1976 , 13). While storytelling, elegance, beauty, the use of lines, diagonals, facial expression, gesture, and so forth, all exist as visible phenomena that are vital to kathak, I here direct focus to the audible aspects of dance experience. In this case, the phenomena of kathak might “yield more readily to an attention that is more concerned with listening” ( Ihde 1976 , 14). Kathak, as a rhythm-based dance form, presents the ideal opportunity for listening.

In this chapter, I also use sites of teaching and learning as the context for a phenomenological investigation of hearing kathak. While direct access to the individual experiences of anyone other than oneself remains elusive, close observations of teaching and learning, supported by supplementary conversations and interviews, provide one window into dancers’ experience of sound and movement. Sites of teaching and learning cultural practices illuminate the ways in which culture is actively produced and worked on; this inevitably involves an active shaping of the perceptual and sensory modes through which we come to experience the world. This chapter is based on my own learning of kathak dance over the last twenty years, including training under the late Pandit Chitresh Das and his disciples, especially one of his senior disciples, Joanna de Souza. From 2004 to 2005 and again from 2007 to 2010, I undertook extensive anthropological fieldwork alongside Das in his schools in Kolkata, India, and San Francisco, United States. Since Das’s passing in early 2015, my training resumed primarily with my first teacher, de Souza, who is based in Toronto, Canada. Kathak dance, like all Hindustani musical practices, is learned through closed lineages of artists, where disciplined training in one style and work with one guru ensures that a complete corpus of knowledge is handed down intact; this includes a “transmission” of stylistic preferences. While Das’s style of kathak shares techniques, skills, and even repertoire with other lineages and gurus, his brand of kathak is well recognized. Das was well known for his rhythmic versatility, virtuosity, and the speed of his footwork, and he established what is now referred to as the “California gharana” ( Chakravorty 2006 ; Morelli 2019 ). Das’s own upbringing in Kolkata in the late 1940s in his parents’ music and dance school, Nritya Bharati, influenced his relationships with well-known musicians, including Ali Akbar Khan and Swapan Chaudhuri, and was one of the contributing factors to his extraordinary penchant for rhythmic versatility. On stage, Das played masterfully with the most accomplished musicians. His depth of understanding of Hindustani music and his rhythmic playfulness certainly brought forward the rhythmic elements of kathak in new and exciting ways, which I discuss later in this chapter. De Souza, one of his earliest disciples, began training under Das in 1978 and brought her own musical background and rhythmic intuition to the dance. During my study with de Souza over the past five years, observation and firsthand experience of her sense of rhythmic playfulness, musicality, and pedagogic attention to sound quality inspired the questions about rhythm and sound that are at the root of this chapter.

Kathak: An Apprenticeship in Hearing

Up until now you have seen me dance, now hear me dance. Pandit Chitresh Das

Kathak is a North Indian dance genre known for its rhythmic footwork, fast pirouettes, the elegance of its gestural vocabulary, and its storytelling component. Dance, music, and theater are all important elements in this classical form. It is commonly accepted that early kathakas descended from a hereditary class of male performers who traveled from village to village in order to narrate stories from the great Hindu epics, the Mahabharata and Ramayana . 2 Much of modern kathak, however, owes its developments and refinement to royal patronage “from Rajput kings throughout Rajasthan and in the Mughal courts of sixteenth through nineteenth century India” ( Morelli 2019 , 9). The Bhakti and Sufi devotional religious movements that swept through India during this period further shaped the kathak repertoire ( Chakravorty 2008 , 26). Many historical threads weave a complex and dynamic narrative; although multiple genealogies exist, it is widely accepted that from the sixteenth through to the nineteenth century, kathak flourished in the Mughal and Hindu courts of Jaipur, Lucknow, and Benares (see Chakravorty 2008 ).

Kathak today shares a deep connection with the Hindustani musical tradition of North India, both of which developed in the court environment ( Morelli 2019 , 9). The rhythms of the pakhāwāj and the tablā drums played an important role in kathak’s development, and many of the rhythmic compositions use the language of these drums ( Das et al. 2001 , 11). Kathak is a percussive dance form, in which dancers share an intimate connection to the music, for they are not simply dancing to the music but creating it themselves through the sounds of their bare feet and ghungrū , the 150 or more brass bells wrapped around each of their ankles. Kathak dancers use sound in multiple ways: employing vocal rhythms, producing sound with the feet, and participating in the sonic environment that defines this cultural aesthetic. Learning to hear is thus an important part of the process of sensory enskillment that occurs in the learning of this art form, a process that psychologist James J. Gibson refers to as an “education of attention” ( 1966 , 1979 ; see also Downey 2016 , 14). Elaborating on this idea, the anthropologist Tim Ingold (2001) proposed Gibson’s education of attention as a more ecologically valid way of understanding cultural learning: “In the passage of human generations, each one contributes to the knowledgeability of the next not by handing down a corpus of disembodied, context-free information, but by setting up, through their activities, the environmental contexts within which successors develop their own embodied skills of perception and action” ( 2001 , 148; see also Ingold 2000 ). The more effectively individuals focus on sensory variables with crucial information, the more accurate and efficient they can be at extracting the information that they need ( Downey 2016 , 14). In the case of kathak, the perceptual skills required in the dance involve a deep training in learning to hear, in “discriminating and disciplining the attention of the senses” and learning to attend to one’s environment ( Grasseni 2004 , 13). Skilled learning in almost any field illustrates the ways in which training in cultural practices hones our perceptual abilities and enskills the body (Downey 2002 , 2016 ; Grasseni 2004 , 2007 ). Certainly, any musical apprenticeship requires a perceptual training and developing of one’s “ear.” But the extent to which learning to hear is required in kathak dance requires a deliberate focus and attention not always afforded to those practices conceptually identified as “dance.”

The Indian concept of saṅgīt , which refers to the combination of voice, instrument, and movement, provides a better framework to understand the multidimensionality of the arts in the Indian aesthetic system; discrete English terms such as “music” or “dance” fail to capture this interconnectedness (see Morelli 2019 , 3). Dancers spend hundreds if not thousands of hours painstakingly refining the movements of their feet, arms, hands, wrists, neck, and eyes in line with the visual aesthetic ideal of kathak, but this is accompanied by an equivalent emphasis on musicality. Dancers must adhere to the structures of the Hindustani musical system. Kathak dancers are evaluated as much for their presentation of rhythm as for their beauty and grace. De Souza recounts that during her time living in Kolkata in the 1990s, it was still common to speak about going to “hear a dance concert” (personal communication, January 7, 2020). Today, lay audiences may need a prompt to tune into the sonic dimension of this dance form; Pandit Das, accustomed to newer audiences in diverse global locations, would often prompt his audiences to “listen” to the sound of his feet. Dancers too must train to cultivate this orientation to the sonic world and undertake an education of attention that habituates their bodies to the sonic world that supports the dance.

The Sonic Space of Kathak: Listening as a Cultural Practice

In Hindustani music and dance, a distinction is often made between educated audiences and lay audiences, given that deep appreciation requires understanding of the complexities of its system. Ihde described this as a

strange “grammar” of gliding, complex, and stylized pieces of Indian music which to the beginner first often appear as not even “music.” The sounding of sympathetic strings and the use of twenty-two microtones, the whine of sitar and sarangi, present musical confusion. Yet once learned, Indian music proves to be one of the most highly classified, organized, and hardened musical traditions in musical history. ( Ihde 1976 , 157)

For patrons and artists alike, an education of attention teaches one to tune in to the sonic space in particular ways. The aesthetic background for kathak typically includes the percussive sound of the tablā or pakhāwāj; the melodic accompaniment given by the sitar, sarod, or sarangi; the drone of the tanpura; and the sound of the dancer. There is a range of other possible accompanists, including a harmonium player, a vocalist, and occasionally a bansuri (flute) player. This sonic world implicates listening as a cultural practice in which practitioners and aficionados must learn how to listen so as to understand the music’s organization and its unique contours ( Samuels et al. 2010 , 330). Learning kathak requires a depth of understanding of Hindustani music that comes through acquaintance with the sound world that supports the dance. The key feature of that sound world is tāl (rhythmic cycle). Learning to hear this style of music, especially for the purposes of kathak, requires an understanding of its musical organization.

North Indian music and dance is structured by the framework of tāl; the most common is tīntāl , a sixteen-beat cycle akin to 4/4 time in Western music. Other common tāls in North Indian dance are rupak (a seven-beat cycle), jhap tāl (a ten-beat cycle), dhamār (a fourteen-beat cycle), and often more challenging half-beat tāls like 9½, referred to as saade nau mātrā . The chosen tāl provides a structure for the passage of time and establishes a relational frame in which musicians and dancers can effectively communicate, anticipate, and collaborate. Each tāl creates a different feeling; dancers and musicians speak of spending years dancing in one tāl to really get to know it. Learning to attend to the tāl is one of the most critical skills in dance. While there may be more variability in the way one gestures, turns, or moves through space, with the rhythmic cycle, you are either in tāl or betāla (without tāl).

The first and most important beat of any tāl is known as sam . Rhythmic compositions can start from anywhere within the designated cycle, lasting one or more cycles but typically concluding quite dramatically on the sam (pronounced “sum”). It is this resolution on sam that marks the successful completion of a rhythmic composition, providing one of the most aesthetically pleasurable moments of live performance. Dancing in tāl is, in fact, so crucial to successful performance that should a dancer land off sam, she must repeat the entire composition over again, even and especially on stage. Precision and accuracy of rhythmic expression within the musical meter is a defining feature of successful performance (see Dalidowicz 2015b , 2021 ). Fellow dancer and ethnomusicologist Ameera Nimjee reflected on her experience of getting acquainted with tāl after years of studying Western classical music: “You really are performing arrival, departure, and then back to arrival over and over and over again; this was a completely new way to relate to musical organization for me” (interview with author, August 4, 2020). Learning to attune to this temporal flow, whether it is marked melodically or percussively, is foundational in kathak.

Musicians relate to the tāl through commonly known drum stokes referred to as thekā ( Ruckert 2004 , 42). For example, the thekā for tīntāl in Das’s lineage would be played and recited through the basic drum strokes represented in Figure 11.1 .

The top line of Figure 11.1 marks the vibhag (sections of the tāl), the second line is the thekā, which represent varying strokes of the tablā, while the bottom line shows the numerical representation of the beats of the tāl. 3 Each vibhag is marked through claps or waves of the hand. Sam is indicated above with a plus sign, while beat nine, referred to as khālī (which means empty), is indicated by a zero and marked with a wave rather than a clap. This temporal flow is marked instrumentally through a repeating melody referred to as nagmā and is played by the accompanying stringed instruments of sitar, sarangi, sarod, or the hand-pumped harmonium. In kathak performance and practice, the key function of the instrumentalist is to play this repeating melody, which acts as an anchor that keeps the dancer oriented to the passage of tāl and one’s place within it. Dancers must ensure tight coordination with the musical accompaniment, perfectly aligned with their rendering of the dance compositions, in order to stay on tāl and resolve successfully on sam.

Thekā of tīntāl.

Tāl is one of the more difficult aspects of kathak to master; it is similarly difficult to communicate how tāl sets up and creates the entire experience for the form. It is not a matter of simply dancing “to” the music; the dancer must be “inside” the music. In an interview with the author, de Souza described it this way: “We are dancing inside the frame … we are the painting inside the frame. The frame does not change, but the design inside the frame can change” (interview with author, May 5, 2020). Nimjee described dancing in tāl through the metaphor of being in a room: “The moment you turn on nagmā, it is like you opened a door into a room, that is contoured by this thing. And you cannot leave the room, so you have to be in the room and the way to be in the room is to be in tāl…. That is how I learned to explain because it is so hard to explain it to those who have no relationship to it. You open this door, and you are in it, and there is no point to do anything without the relationship with it, because then why are you in that room at all” (interview with author, August 4, 2020). What de Souza and Nimjee describe is the inseparability of tāl from both Hindustani music and dance: a dancer typically performs her art within the given structure of the tāl. Tāl contours the experience, and it is within the sonic space of tāl that dancers move and sound, and their dance becomes meaningful.

Learning to hear the nagmā and maintain nascent awareness of the passage of the tāl is a key skill in becoming a kathak dancer. I asked dancers, “When you are practicing, what is the focus of your listening?” All maintain the critical importance of attending to tāl or nagmā. As Nimjee put it in an interview, “I think there is a hierarchy of what I listen to, and the first is of course nagmā, and then listening for sam, and then my feet have a moral responsibility to uphold that” (interview with author, August 4, 2020). Fellow dancer and tablā player Anita Katakkar explained, “My ear will rotate through different sounds. If I am not solid, I will force myself to listen to the nagmā, listen to the melody, otherwise for me it is a little more subconscious. I may be listening to the bols in my head or my voice. If I am playing with multiple instruments, I usually focus on one at a time” (interview with author, August 12, 2020). Dancers and musicians communicate and keep the tāl by marking it with their hands, through claps, waves, and finger movements. Viscerally marking the tāl in this way helps internalize rhythm and pulse but also communicates the tāl visually to others. In learning a rhythmic composition, a student always learns to recite while marking the tāl with their hands. Knowing a rhythmic bol requires an embodied understanding of its relation to the tāl. This did not always come easily, and teachers intervened in a variety of ways, stressing gaps or the downbeat, or highlighting other markers that would help students become aware of the passage of tāl and one’s relation to it.

Teachers encourage development not by transferring knowledge but, as Downey (2016 , 14) would argue, by directing novices’ attention to the most crucial sensory variables in the environment. Das and his disciples developed numerous strategies to build this awareness, including “kathak yoga,” a pedagogic technique that did precisely this: directed learners’ attention to the key variables of the sound world that supported kathak. Das’s innovation of kathak yoga is a practice whereby dancers sing the repeating melody of the nagmā, thus replacing the role of the instrumentalist and creating the melodic frame of the tāl through their own voice. In this form of self-accompaniment, dancers sing the nagmā while executing dance compositions with their body and feet. In a more advanced version, students play manjira (hand cymbals), marking the main beat and the micro beats of the time cycle. Das played tablā while dancing; several of his disciples now play harmonium while dancing. Performing these tasks simultaneously—musical counting, singing, playing an instrument, and dancing—may be bewildering at first, but it ultimately serves as a pedagogical device that hones the dancer’s attention to tāl and cultivates rhythmic versatility. 4 Doing so, the dancer “cannot avoid paying mind to this structure (the tāl) and the way in which a composition fits into the cycle, for there is nowhere to hide from the thekā when you are producing it yourself” ( Morelli 2007 , 173). Kathak yoga provides dancers with a deeper embodied understanding of the composition’s relationship to the tāl, honing perception to the key elements of the sound world and ultimately preparing students for performing with live musicians by developing their “feel” for their place in the rhythmic cycle.

The ideal state to which dancers aspire is to internalize the tāl to such a point that it remains ongoing in their body, even without any external sound source. Among students of renowned artists like Das or the famed tablā player Swapan Chaudhuri, stories frequently circulate that illustrate their teacher’s deep assimilation of tāl. Such narratives describe how the great dancer or musician is able to maintain ongoing awareness of the temporal passage of tāl without any external auditory cues. The artist will begin by marking the tāl and then engage in a normal conversation while they internally sense the passage of the cycle with metronomic precision. After several cycles of the tāl having passed, the teacher will bring the tāl back to explicit awareness and resolve exactly and emphatically on the moment of the sam.

The Sound of Feet

The basic eight-step tatkār pattern can also be performed by using different strokes of the feet to produce different sounds, for example, by using only the toes ( punje ) or by combining sounds of the heels and full foot ( eṛī ), as detailed in Figure 11.2 (see also Morelli 2019 , 92).

Learning how to lift the foot and slap it on the ground to produce an audible sound is one of the more difficult elements for students to figure out, should they not be predisposed to a sonorous slap. Getting clarity of sound, with eight even sounds, is equally challenging. What Ingold says of sensory education in general is true of kathak dance; guided by teachers, “students learned how to make ‘sensory correction(s)’ by continually adjusting or ‘tuning’ the movement in response to an ongoing perceptual monitoring of the emergent task” ( Ingold 2000 , 353). If we consider the rather mechanistic task of slapping the foot upon the floor over and over, dancers need to learn how to hold their weight; how to initiate the movement while keeping relaxed in the hips, knees, and feet; and how to “tune” these movements in accordance with the sonorous production of a “slap” on the floor. The sensation of the foot on the floor and its vibration is inseparable from the action’s auditory expression, and dancers must continually monitor these varied sensorial inputs. Even the texture of the floor matters here; the acoustic property of the floor comes to life as dancers orient their movement toward their material environment. Teachers develop strategies to aid students in learning, and students adopt training techniques to help them develop the strength and dexterity to produce the idealized sound. De Souza frequently had students practice accenting different strokes of the eight-step pattern (e.g., 1 and 4, 2 and 5, 3 and 6, or 4 and 8). Each accent requires students to shift their weight in ways not usually anticipated in the basic pattern. The accent exercise teaches students to produce the full eight sounds for each cycle of tatkār, but in so doing, it also further develops dexterity and versatility (see Dalidowicz 2015b ).

Sounds of the tatkār footwork pattern.

In performance, certain elements of a traditional solo are designed to highlight the rhythms of kathak. The savāl-javāb (question-answer) section of the kathak solo is an improvisatory exchange between the dancer and tablā player: the dancer produces unplanned rhythmic phrases with their feet, responding in a question-and-answer segment to the rhythmic phrases of the tablā. 5   Ladi (string or series) compositions used in tablā are also “good for listening,” as de Souza explained; the dancer will play with a basic rhythmic phrase and variants through high-energy footwork. One of the most appreciated and controversial aspects of Das’s repertoire was his performance of “Relgari” (rail car), often referred to as the “train,” in which he sonically represented the journey of a steam train from one station to the next. He performed this without the support of musicians, using only his feet and ghungrū to represent what he has described as the “sound of a railway carriage leaving the station, changing tracks, gathering speed, crossing a bridge, passing open fields and trees, slowing down, changing tracks, gaining, and finally reaching its destination and coming to a halt on the platform” ( Ghosh 1981 , 5–6, cited in Morelli 2019 , 61). Although Das’s train was popular among audiences, staunch traditionalists criticized its overemphasis on sound (i.e., the dominance of the sounding rhythm over the visual), as well as its “rendering of an inanimate aspect of the modern world, as opposed to more common depictions of characters from India’s ancient epics” ( Morelli 2019 , 62; see also Saxena 1991 ). In fact, other renowned dancers are known to have presented the sounds of the inanimate world, such as cannons, in dance ( Morelli 2019 , 61–62). Das also presented sounds of the natural world, such as galloping horses and peacocks. Das and his disciples, especially de Souza, were oriented to the sounding aspects of this form, and numerous productions were designed to highlight its rhythmic elements. For example, Das’s ongoing collaboration with tap dancer Jason Samuels Smith, which was originally entitled “Fastest Feet in Rhythm” and later rebranded as “India Jazz Suites,” highlighted the rhythmic play between these two artists. 6 De Souza’s piece “HUM” was created for Toronto’s Body Percussion festival in 2014 and required dancers to use only their bodies in the production of sound, providing de Souza an opportunity to highlight the ways kathak dancers use their feet, bodies, and voice to create rhythm.

Speaking Rhythm, Catching Rhythm

Learning kathak dance means first learning to “speak” the dance. As de Souza explained to a beginning group of kathak students, “everything we dance has a spoken language. Everything we dance, we can speak.” Kathak dance, like most music and dance in India, is first learned through vocalized syllables known as bols. Bol comes from the word bolna , which literally means “to speak.” Bols are often described simply as mnemonic syllables that aid the learning and remembering of what was, historically, an oral tradition. The use of what have been referred to as vocables to communicate musical ideas and represent musical sounds exists across Indian musical traditions and also in cultures beyond India, such as the canntaireachd used in Scottish bagpipe music ( Fatone 2010 ) or the vocalized syllables of Ipchangdan in Korean drumming ( Kwon 2015 ). Within the Hindustani musical system of North India, there is a shared language between kathak and the percussive instruments of tablā and pakhāwāj. While there are dance-specific bols for kathak, many of the bols kathak dancers use come from percussion. This rhythmic language provides units of sounds, phrasing, and a kind of grammar that allows dancers to express musical ideas.

Other lesser used bols represent sounds of nature, such as “koo” for the call of the peacock. While bols may have originally shared an onomatopoeic relationship with the sounds that they are said to represent, multiple ways to execute the syllables have weakened this relationship over time ( Ananthanarayana and Rao 2018 , 1229). Bols are often interchangeable, and knowing how a bol should be expressed is contextual and relies on one-on-one training with a teacher who can explain how it should be played in a specific context. In most cases, the poetry of the bol composition takes precedence over maintaining a consistent matching to strokes. Figure 11.3 illustrates a basic tatkār kī bandish composition using dance bols and lasting one cycle (see also Das et al. 2001 , 27).

Basic tatkār kī bandish composition in one cycle on tīntāl.

Most dancers with whom I spoke referred to a “catching of the rhythm” as a first step in learning the dance, where not all bols are intelligible and not all rhythmic phrases within the full composition are clear. In an interview, dancer Jane Morris described her experience of learning more complicated rhythmic phrases: “I first try to catch the rhythm. You can use nonsense syllables if you don’t know them. It is the rhythm that you catch. Then I try to scat my way through the bols …. But it is the rhythm, first and foremost” (interview with author, July 28, 2020). Familiarity with phrasing allows dancers to catch rhythms quickly, and students can fill in the blanks and anticipate patterns based on experience. In an interview with the author, Kathak student and tablā musician Katakkar described this as follows:

Everyone has a different approach, but in my experience, if you don’t catch the recitation, then you are building stuff on a shaky foundation …. There will be patterns that start to repeat, so it starts to be like language, phrases that you have heard before, and they come up again. So the more you practice, the more you are able to catch on to familiar phrases. But typically when I’m learning … I will recite with tāl, and then I will know approximately where things fall, and then I try to fill it in, that’s how I operate…. I’ll just try and grab what it is I know I can hear and what I know is happening. And the rest, I try not to get too caught up on that; it is pointless. You can’t always catch everything all at once. I catch what I can, and then I fill in the blanks. (interview with author, August 12, 2020)

The sound of the bols serves as an accessible introduction to the movement, whereby articulating the bols verbally (a visceral action in itself that involves gestures of the lungs, throat, tongue, and lips) allows the dancer to catch the rhythm; with this in place, the performers are then more easily able to express those motions in dance gestures of the arms, hands, feet, and so forth. In other words, vocalization of these patterns is already a fully embodied act. As I discuss further below, the way dancers speak about catching rhythm hints at the pre-reflexive bodily unity that allows perception to facilitate verbal gestures and verbal gestures to facilitate the dance.

Katakkar’s quote highlights another important point: that the “grabbing” or “catching” of recitation only makes sense within the context of tāl. The cyclic nature of tāl gives the necessary temporal orientation, providing a structure for dancers to situate the phrasing within. Discussing the Carnatic tradition, David P. Nelson describes the relationship between tāl and the specific rhythmic composition that a musician or dancer performs: “The tāḷa in its unwavering repetition exerts a centripetal force on the material, while the grouping into rhythmic phrases at times exerts a centrifugal pull with respect to the tāḷa . Rhythmic unity requires simultaneous attention to the structure of the tāḷa and the movement of the patterns” ( 1991 , 2). In other words, the steadiness of tāl can create a “pull” on the rhythm, attracting the composition toward its unmistakable beat. This is a common mistake, where dancers inadvertently align the main stresses of the composition with the downbeat of the tāl. To produce the proper understanding of the relationship between the tāl and the composition, dancers and musicians will mark the beats of tāl with claps or waves of the hands (and fingers) while reciting the bols, informing their understanding of how the rhythm falls in relation to the basic frame. Marked with corresponding gestures, these downbeats provide way points along the temporal progression of the cycle, facilitating a tactile awareness of the progression of tāl and one’s place in it. In initial stages of learning a new composition, a teacher may provide vocal or gestural emphasis at certain points within the pattern to highlight the way the rhythm falls in relation to tāl, stressing certain syllables that land on the main beat or emphasizing the beginning of a new pattern to provide markers that students can easily catch. The teacher may slow down the laya (tempo of the tāl) to highlight gaps for the learner or count the microbeats to highlight exactly where the rhythm falls. Mark Johnson, interpreting the work of Suzanne Langer (1947) , explains that

When we are actively listening to music, we imaginatively enter into its “motion,” experiencing all of the ways it moves, swells, hops, rushes, floats, trips along, drags, soars, and falls. This musical soaring, floating, or falling is experienced by us as our felt flow of experience. We feel it in our vital, tactile-kinaesthetic bodies. When the music builds up tension (for example, as it moves pitch-wise from the lower through the middle to a high range), we experience that tension in ourselves. If we didn’t, music would never move us. ( Johnson 2006 , 14)

This applies to the percussive rhythms of kathak. The relationship between the tāl and the composition is already a kind of motion in itself. Dancers initially feel the qualities of that motion (tensions, gaps, unity, and so forth) by listening, and they later engage the tāl and composition by vocalizing their rhythms. As a result of all of this, the motion of their rhythm flows into the dance.

Hearing with the Body

The vocalized form of the rhythm takes on a new and anticipated dimension in the kinesthetic, visual, and sonic fields, as rhythms are brought forth in movement and in the sound of the body in motion. In class with de Souza, a new composition will be introduced through vocalized syllables and, depending on the complexity of the piece and level of the students, may be repeated multiple times. Typically, the choreographed movements are learned soon thereafter, and from that point forward, the vocalized bol and the dance bol become inseparable. What enables all of this is the fundamentally intersensorial nature of motion and a unified consciousness from which discrete sensory modalities become mere abstractions, as I will show below. The rhythmic motion of the composition is manifest through learned techniques, such as footwork, gestures, or pirouettes. Included in a kathaka’s vocabulary of movement are also the subtle gestures of the head, neck, hands, wrists, eyes, and eyebrows that bring forth the rhythm. 7 A rhythmic phrase could be performed in an endless variety of choregraphed or improvised ways. Most compositions, however, are taught initially through basic or skeleton choreography, which draws on conventions within the lineage and makes use of accepted relationships between bols and dance vocabulary. Advanced students may be able to predict certain movement phrases, particularly dance bols that represent footwork or others that are commonly expressed in an accepted way and easily anticipated; for example, “kī ta taka tun” was often expressed using the lotus hand gesture, moving from above the head to chest level with a matched footwork pattern. Choreographed variations could go in many directions, even being performed purely through gat bhāv (storytelling), and as such, a student’s ability to anticipate diminished quickly.

In his work on listening to the Brazilian dance and martial art form capoeira, Greg Downey writes, “Without the bodily predispositions incorporated from others through apprenticeship … the experience of hearing for most listeners … is bereft of its visceral dimensions…. For those who are trained in listening, however, movement and musical sound seem so closely linked that they can imagine music as a route to proficiency” ( 2002 , 503). In kathak, dancers learn through long-term training to make this immediate link between sound and its visceral dimension. Movements are never learned in isolation from a vocalized equivalent, and in the bodies and minds of dancers, movements sound. Learning to dance involves embodying these learned associations between movement and their sonic counterparts. In hearing or reciting the bols, such as “tat tat theī tigga dha digga digga theī,” a known movement phrase is called forth in the body of the dancer that involves a right-left-right footwork pattern with accompanying arm gestures, followed by a five-step turn. Part of skilled learning within kathak is thus cultivating the ability to understand the entrenched relationality between the vocalized rhythm and its kinetic counterpart. Although there is no exclusive relationship between bol and movement, the movement phrase itself is never independent of the vocalized bol. This enduring relationship of body movement with body sound marks one of the distinctive qualities of this dance form.

This relationship also allows the voice to be used instructively to provide cues as to how something should be danced. “You must recite to inform the body and to get the nuances of sound,” de Souza explained (interview with author, August 1, 2020). Here, the voice can communicate how a rhythmic idea should be expressed in movement. The prosodic style of recitation employed by teachers like de Souza is used to indicate something about the quality of movement and how specific bols can be danced. Bols can be stretched, sharpened, or weighted heavily or lightly. Volume and pitch can be manipulated. De Souza uses melismatic vocalization of otherwise syllabic bols to inform movements. A change of pitch across one syllable could be indicative of movement being elongated and then released. Recitation, with pitch and intensity variation, is thus akin to the recitation of poetry ( Ruckert 2004 , 51). Here the voice informs the dancing, in as much as it sets the rhythmic structure. Rohit Ananthanarayana and Preeti Rao describe a similar pedagogic tool in tablā: “Despite the skeletal description embedded in the score, the bol recitation of the composition is highly expressive and packed with prosodic variations, and this information is passed on orally from teacher to pupil” ( Ananthanarayana and Rao 2018 , 1230). Much of what is transmitted in any oral tradition are the nuances and ornaments that give a bol its style and beauty; it is the “how to” of recitation rather than simply the structure of the composition itself. This is why direct study with a teacher has remained critical to the sharing of kathak as an oral tradition. Students learn to hear how the movement should be danced by first listening to the teacher and then reproducing it in their own recitation, which informs the body how to dance. Long-term study with one teacher also cultivates an adept ear, such that hearing the inflections and nuances of the teacher’s voice brings a practical understanding of the teacher’s style, preferences, and expectations for movement.

While bol compositions, which are passed on as part of a corpus of knowledge within a lineage, can be independently represented through transcription today, the transmission of knowledge remains an entirely embodied act. Even with something as directly representable as a bol, knowing comes through a process of guided discovery. As Seema Mehta, disciple of Das and director of the Chhandam Nritya Bharati Mumbai kathak dance school, explained, “You can give your book to someone but no one will be able to understand the bols you have written. It is still an oral tradition, even if you are writing [it] down. You have to physically be there” (personal communication, May 15, 2020). Written transcriptions of bols must ultimately be brought into the oral tradition if they are to serve kathak practitioners. Whether transcriptions are made in Roman or Devanagari script, these representational systems utilize arbitrary symbols that have no sensuous connection to the sounds they represent. In contrast, the vocalized bols are the sonic manifestation of motion. This goes directly to Merleau-Ponty’s point that speech itself is an entirely embodied act, in which arbitrary symbols are given meaning through the body ( [1945] 1962 , 182). Johnson elaborates on Merleau-Ponty’s ideas on the bodily basis for emergent meaning: “A composer does not frame conceptual meanings in her head, which she then somehow cleverly expresses in musical pitch contours. Rather, the meaning emerges only in and through the act of making music. Music is not an external sign system we use to express non-musical meanings or concepts. Rather, the meaning exists in the enactment” ( 2006 , 10). Langer provides further insight: “A work of art does not point us to a meaning beyond its own presence. What is expressed cannot be grasped apart from the sensuous or poetic form that expresses it. In a work of art, we have the direct presentation of a feeling, not a sign that points to it” ( 1947 , 133–134). Similarly, the musical or rhythmic meaning of the bol resides in its enactment by the living body. Contrary to representational systems that we find in written language, the sonic materiality of the vocalized bol is not arbitrary. The sound itself entails a form of motion. The perception of these sounds allows embodied subjects to assimilate forms of motion that can be manifested in dance gestures and other musical forms.

The Conflation of Movement and Sound

At first glance, it appears that learning a rhythmic bol follows a linear process whereby the vocalization precedes the movement and is a precursor to the next phase. In fact, recitation and movement work in tandem. Movements help dancers to make sense of parts of the bol that they may not have grasped only through vocalizing. As Nimjee explained, “Each informs the other; it is back and forth. There is something that happens when you recite the bol that triggers your body to remember things. But more so, when you are dancing in context, it helps you to make sense of a bol that you may not have rhythmically totally understood previously. You get the bol in its full integrity because you put movement into it. I really think one influences the other” (interview with author, August 4, 2020). In order to understand the experience of hearing musical sound, we should examine the processes through which it is apprehended, and these processes, as Downey argues, are often dance or movement ( 2002 , 504).

Processes of recall and remembering similarly rely on the collaborative work of the voice and the movements of the body. Vocalized bols are described as mnemonic devices, but the bols are not always the precursor to remembering. I have witnessed dancers (myself included) who struggle to correctly recall elements of a particular vocalized bol composition add a motor dimension to the memory work and bring forth the correct verbal syllables by enacting the accompanying movements. Mehta reflects on her process: “It is a synchronized memory work because the movement helps to remember the bol and the bol helps to remember the movement. They go hand in hand. Especially for long compositions, if I don’t have the recitation, I may start dancing, and then the movements definitely help me to remember the bols” (personal communication, May 15, 2020). In an interview, Katakkar similarly observes, “Dance is a real asset, because when you are using your body, you have your body memory. There are all these connections you can form with the movement and the bols that each feed each other. I wonder if it might be easier to remember compositions because you do dance them, and when you are dancing them, because you remember the movements, they remind you of the bols. It is a back-and-forth thing with dance that you don’t have with tablā” (interview with author, August 12, 2020). Observing this process of learning, I saw clearly that the recitation was not simply the precursor to the movement.

What was striking about dancers’ explanations of the relationship between recited bol and danced bol was their inseparability. Dancers think of movement through sonic equivalents and similarly think of sound through movement equivalents. Using the perspective of cognitive science, some learning theorists and psychologists have considered this “conflation phenomenon,” which is often seen within traditions of oral music learning, as a kind of mapping of an ideal vocal image to an instrumental utterance (see Gordon 1989 ; Brinner 1995 ; Godoy 2003 ; McNeill 2005 ). In her study of Scottish bagpiping, Gina Fatone describes the “extraordinary adeptness of the mind to seemingly ‘conflate’ or translate images from and between various modalities of experience” ( 2010 , 408). “In addition to instrumental demonstration, instructors used vocabelising, conducting gestures with the hands or the chanter, or verbally expressed, metaphoric images of object or body motion to convey musical information. The student then transferred these aural, visual, or imagined images into manual action made auditory through the pipe chanter” ( Fatone 2010 , 403). Following this line of thinking, the student’s task involves transferring knowledge from one domain (the auditory) to another (the motor). Psychologists identify pedagogical tools such as these, which enable students to think of one thing in terms of another, as cross-domain or cross-modal cognitive processes—that is, mental operations involving the transfer or interaction of counterparts between different domains of experience (e.g., the visual, motor, auditory, vocal, or imagined domains; Fatone 2010 , 397). Implicit in this approach is the assumption that with the transfer of cognitive processes there must also be a transfer between various modalities of experience. Yet, in listening to the kathak dancers describe their experiences and in analyzing my own, it became evident that the practice of recitation and dance was not a case of “thinking of one thing in terms of another.” The vocalized and motor expressions of the bol were experienced as originating from the same place, and therefore as being one and the same. The experiences of the kathak dancer provide evidence of the synesthesia between informed hearing and corporeal activity, and the imbrication of the two as a perceptual system ( Gibson 1966 ; Downey 2002 , 503). To consider the multisensory way in which dancers learn to apprehend and recall rhythm, I turn to the phenomenology of Merleau-Ponty for another explanation of this conflation phenomena.

Synesthesia and the Sensing Body

The senses translate themselves without the need for an interpreter: they understand each other without having to pass through an idea. ( Merleau-Ponty [1945] 1962 , 244)

The conflation of sound and movement in a kathak dancer’s perception and experience highlights an important point. While empirically it may make sense to say that we have five discrete senses, phenomenologically speaking, this is not how we experience the world. As Merleau-Ponty suggests, perception of discrete sensory experiences is a learned attitude that blurs the basic, originary experience of knowing and being in the world:

I say that my eyes see, and my hand touches, and that my foot hurts, but these naïve expressions do not convey my genuine experience. They already present me with an interpretation that detaches from its original subject. Because I know that light strikes my eyes, that contact is made by the skin, and that my shoe hurts my foot, I distribute the perceptions that belong to my soul into my body: I place perception within the perceived. But this is nothing but the spatial and temporal wake of conscious acts. If I consider them from within, I find a single knowledge that has no location, a soul that has no parts, and there is no difference between thinking and perceiving, or between seeing and hearing. ( Merleau-Ponty [1945] 1962 , 220)

Merleau-Ponty describes the synesthesia of senses as the basic form of lived experience, not an anomalous one. The dancer immersed in rhythms may be afforded a pre-objective sense of the body in its originary state of synesthesia. The lived experience of what has elsewhere been explained as cross-modal or inter-modal processes is better accounted for through a view of the whole body as the subject of perception: “The senses are distinct and yet indiscernible, like monocular images in binocular vision” ( Merleau-Ponty [1945] 1962 , 239). In this view, sensory registers mediate environmental input, but the single knowledge is embodied universally in a self that is undifferentiated.

Rhythm provides one of the more available opportunities for something akin to an experience of originary perception. Rhythms can be felt, heard, seen, and touched; we find rhythm in sound, in visual images, in textures, in the flow of time, or in movements of the body. Restricting experience to a single sensory register is superficial and misrepresents the fundamental level of embodied experience. “Synesthetic perception is the rule and, if we do not notice it, this is because scientific knowledge displaces experience[,] and we have unlearned seeing, hearing, and sensing in general in order to deduce what we ought to see, hear, or sense from our bodily organisation and from the world as is conceived by the physicist” ( Merleau-Ponty [1945] 1962 , 238). The musicking and moving body provides an opportunity for synesthetic experience in which we can dispense with—if only momentarily—this logic that our bodies have internalized through participation in a rationalist world. If we look phenomenologically at the body, we can see that, at the originary layer of perception, senses are not indistinguishable, and these moments of intersensorial experience, or what has been referred to as cross-modality, are actually hinting at what is the basic, originary experience of knowing and being in the world. There is no requirement for representations to be transferred from one modality to another or for the requirement of sense experience to pass through an idea.

Disciplined training shapes the perceptual system, encouraging dancers to leverage the synesthetic possibilities of experience. If we consider Merleau-Ponty’s view of synesthetic perception alongside a phenomenological view of skilled learning as a series of sensory corrections that requires continual adjusting or a tuning in response to an ongoing perceptual monitoring of the emergent task ( Ingold 2000 , 353), we can understand the conflation phenomena through a view of the body in its world, acting intelligently through ongoing interaction with the environment, rather than being the result of a purely mental activity. Learning and performing are not about the internal work of the mind accessing an accumulated store of representations; on the contrary, learning and bringing forth dance is a process that comes about through the agent’s fine-tuned perception of the environment. For the kathak dancer, that fine-tuning of the body is directed to the sonic qualities of the material world. Through an ongoing education of attention, the very infrastructure of a dancer’s perceptual system is shaped: this culturally generated mode of attention brings to the foreground of our experience the synesthetic possibilities of sensing our world.

Phenomenology and Dance

What does it mean to hear dance? Dancers hear the vocalizations and rhythms of the dance through more than just their ears. The rhythms resonate through the body and can be felt from the feet to the fingers. In Listening and Voice: Phenomenologies of Sound , Ihde (1976) reminds us that hearing is never entirely an auditory experience: “Phenomenologically I do not merely hear with my ears, I hear with my whole body. My ears are at best the focal organs of hearing. This may be detected quite dramatically in listening to loud rock music. The bass notes reverberate in my stomach, and even my feet ‘hear’ the sound of the auditory orgy” (44). Tactile, kinetic, and even visual processes are central in creating our experience of sound. Scottish percussionist Evelyn Glennie, who is profoundly deaf, provides her take on hearing:

Hearing is basically a specialized form of touch. Sound is simply vibrating air which the ear picks up and converts to electrical signals, which are then interpreted by the brain. The sense of hearing is not the only sense that can do this, touch can do this too. If you are standing by the road and a large truck goes by, do you hear or feel the vibration? The answer is both…. For some reason we tend to make a distinction between hearing a sound and feeling a vibration, in reality they are the same thing. ( Glennie 2015 )

Glennie further describes the role of vision in creating a sound experience: “We can also see items move and vibrate. If I see a drumhead or cymbal vibrate or even see the leaves of a tree moving in the wind, then subconsciously my brain creates a corresponding sound” ( Glennie 2015 ). As a profoundly deaf musician, Glennie has tuned in to other sensory aspects of hearing that are, in fact, available to all of us. Although we have normalized the association between hearing and the function of the ears, sound experience draws on all sensory functions, in varying proportions and in ways unique to the person and their context. In learning to hear, kathak dancers similarly learn to tune in to other aspects of their world, to hear tactilely through the vibrations of their feet, to hear kinetically and visually through the gestures of body. Hearing is movement-based: sound and rhythm are apprehended, remembered, and expressed viscerally, through the whole body. From this perspective, all kinetic experience is irrevocably sonic, tactile, and visual. The fundamentally intersensorial nature of bodily being can be grasped more easily in an example like kathak, an art form in which embodied motion transcends boundaries between the sonic and the gestural.

The insights of phenomenology provide a perspective that uncovers to the kathak dancer’s sonorous relationship with their world. Phenomenology, in this case, allows us to attend to aspects of dancers’ perception and experience that may otherwise be missed through a conventional approach to the study of dance or music. Phenomenology can assist us to move past an empirical understanding of sense experience towards a richer description of the way things are lived and felt, challenging conventional rationalistic views of what it means and feels like to be human. For a dancer, the very infrastructure of perception is cultivated through systematic training, and this provides for a unique attunement to the world, one in which the sonic and kinetic fields intersect and interact in complementary ways, where sound and movement can be experienced as the same phenomena. I have here tried to evoke a sense of how the body is brought to life in new ways through training in a cultural aesthetic that ultimately shapes the way we perceive the world around us.

Elsewhere, I have explored the ways that learning the dramatic art of storytelling within kathak required dancers to visually and kinesthetically attend to elements of the background world of India that typically escaped their conscious attention ( Dalidowicz 2015a ). During residency in India alongside their guru, Pandit Chitresh Das’s American-trained students were directed to the tacit aspects of daily life in Kolkata, certain patterns of interaction, emotional relationships, or modes of deference that became critical to a total education in kathak. The passive pedagogies of being-in-place in Kolkata provided an invisible backdrop from which Das was able to foreground a particular historical horizon necessary to learning the affective dimension of the dance.

Although this view is commonly accepted, Margaret Walker’s book India’s Kathak Dance in Historical Perspective (2014) casts doubt on this familiar version of the genre’s historical narrative.

In the transcription reproduced below, George Ruckert provides an example of a more commonly known thekā for tablā players. Ruckert explains how this thekā is played: “On the tablā , which is a combination of a left and a right hand drum … , the ‘t-’ sounds [all of the sounds starting with the letter ‘t’] are produced with the right hand alone striking its right drum, while the ‘dh-’ sounds [all of the sounds starting with the letter ‘d’] are produced by both drums striking simultaneously: a treble and a bass sound together” ( Ruckert 2004 , 43).

For a YouTube video of Das, Antara Bhardwaj, and Rachna Nivas performing kathak yoga for an audience, see Asian Art Museum (2014) .

For a YouTube video of Das performing this kind of call-and-response with a tablā player, see chhandam (2008) .

For a YouTube video of Das and Smith performing this piece together, see chhandamfan (2007) .

For a YouTube video of de Souza performing a series of compositions that highlight the vocalized bols and the accompanying movements, see personalladoos (2007) .

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Cultural Geography of Kathak Dance: Streams of Tradition and Global Flows

The article deals with the modern history of Kathak, explored from regional perspectives. It focuses on the Lucknow gharānā (“school”) of Kathak, which sprung up mainly in courts and salons of colonial Avadh as a product of Indo-Islamic culture. The paper investigates how the shift of hereditary artists from Lucknow to Delhi affected their tradition in newly founded, state-supported institutions. It also examines various trends of further modernization of Kathak in globalized, metropolitan spaces. The tendency of Sanskritization in national dance institutes (Kathak Kendra) is juxtaposed with the preservation of ‘traditional’ form in dance schools of Lucknow (nowadays becoming more provincial locations of Kathak tradition) and innovative / experimental tendencies. The impact of regional culture, economic conditions and cosmopolitanism are regarded as important factors reshaping Kathak art, practice and systems of knowledge transmission. The paper is based on ethnographic fieldwork, combined with historical research, conducted in the period 2014–2015.

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The geometric analysis with a chronological order for the basic movements and footwork used in kathak.

Author: Sandip Mallick

Issue Date: 2017

Publisher: Centre for Cultural Resources and Training

Description: In this paper, the geometrical nature of Kathak dance form is studied and analysed.

Type: Performing arts

Received From: Centre for Cultural Resources and Training

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Bhakti, Bells, and Bollywood Positioning Kathak Dance as a Religious Ritual in Urban India

2019, ProQuest

The North Indian classical dance form of Kathak remains a prominent mode of artistic and cultural expression in the rapidly changing environments of urban India. As elements of the dance have been included in mediums of pop-culture the traditional form and religious aspects have been maintained by practitioners in the midst of change. Kathak has inherent religious qualities and a rich religious history intersecting with both Hindu and Muslim practices and ideologies. Throughout historical changes and outside cultural influences Kathak has maintained its nature as a religious ritual relevant to a multiplicity of practitioners in the way it incorporates a variety of religious ideas and practices while providing a spiritual experience for artists and audiences. This thesis notes the balance of tradition and change in Kathak through its history and transmission and how this balance fosters ritual relevancy for its practitioners in an urban setting.

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This paper seeks to problematize the current state of Indian classical dance and its relation to religion in the Canada-based Indian diaspora, with a special focus on Toronto and Montreal. Using data from the early stages of my PhD ethnographic research, this essay contrasts text and practice to demonstrate that the current state of dance in the diaspora has evolved: while the “classical” norms of aesthetics and ideas about religion/spirituality that have been mobilized in the discourse about and practice of Bharatanātyam since the late 19th century still have some salience to this day, a new discourse and approach are emerging from this “ideal” state of dance, allowing performers not only to redefine their own practice in their changing socio-cultural environment, but also to decide for themselves whether their practice is spiritual/religious or not.

Katarzyna Skiba

The paper explores the ambivalent nature of poems that are part and parcel of the kathak dance repertoire in the context of a changing system of dance patronage during the 19th and 20th centuries in North India. Through a textual analysis of selected ṭhumrī songs, the author investigates the use of śṛṅgāra rasa (erotic sentiment) in this poetic genre in relation to its original, secular function and its interpretation in religious idioms. The comparison of traditional ṭhumrī s with the compositions prevalent on the modern, classical dance stage shall underline a shift in the character of kathak performance (from romantic, sensual and intimate to devotional and impersonal). The attempts to locate ṭhumrī in the shastric framework and to 'purify' the content of these poems from the imprints of its lineage with tawā'if s culture is examined as part of the process of reinventing kathak in response to the tastes of a new class of patrons and performers and matching this art to the vision of Indian cultural heritage, propagated by nationalists.

cristina bignami , Ewa Dębicka-Borek

Margaret E Walker

My PhD Dissertation, University of Toronto, 2004.

Visual Anthropology

Pallabi Chakravorty

MUSICultures

Although Euro-American musical revivals are usually connected to folk music, the postcolonial Indian revival privileged “classical” music and dance as objects of priceless national heritage. Yet, the revival in India was not a straightforward process of cultural recovery in the wake of occupation. Issues of authority, authenticity and appropriation are woven into the process of reclamation. Through a comparison of this period in Indian dance history with themes in current theories of revival, this article moves towards a model of “revival” as a global phenomenon seeking to broaden our understanding of cultural continuity and change.

Journal of the Indian Musicological Society

A careful search through historical sources for either a dance called kathak or people called Kathaks, with a goal of understanding the roots of the 20th-century dance called kathak.

Anthropological Notebooks

Sarah Morelli

Kathak, a classical dance form from northern India, characterised by rhythmically sophisticated footwork, quick turns and storytelling, is traditionally passed down from teacher to student through a close relationship known as the guru-shishya parampara (teacher-disciple tradition). This article examines the shifts in teaching and dance techniques over three generations of gurus and shishyas within one gharānā (stylistic school) of Kathak. Both the culture of training and dance materials have been adapted to changing socio-historical realities, from the decline of the courtesan culture and the growing independence movement in northern India in the early 20 th century to the dance's transplantation in North America in the latter part of the century. This close study of one dance lineage illuminates the impact that changing historical realities and individual proclivities have played in kathak's stylistic development. It demonstrates that even the basic elements of this style of kathak have been subject to change; furthermore, this flexibility has been a vital part of the teaching of this solo performance tradition since at least the mid-twentieth century. Dance finely tunes sensibilities, helping to shape the practices, behaviours, beliefs and ideas of people's lives. At the same time, the multiplicity of ethnographic realities shapes the unique and historical occasion of any dance. All this raises questions about the transmission and transformation of dance from one cultural setting to another, as well as from one historical period to another (Bull 1997: 285).

The article deals with the modern history of Kathak, explored from regional perspectives. It focuses on the Lucknow gharānā (“school”) of Kathak, which sprung up mainly in courts and salons of colonial Avadh as a product of Indo-Islamic culture. The paper investigates how the shift of hereditary artists from Lucknowto Delhi affected their tradition in newly founded, state-supported institutions. It also examines various trends of further modernization of Kathak in globalized, metropolitan spaces. The tendency of Sanskritization in national dance institutes (Kathak Kendra) is juxtaposed with the preservation of ‘traditional’ form in dance schools of Lucknow (nowadays becoming more provincial locations of Kathak tradition) and innovative / experimental tendencies. The impact of regional culture, economic conditions and cosmopolitanism are regarded as important factors reshaping Kathak art, practice and systems of knowledge transmission. The paper is based on ethnographic fieldwork, combined with historical research, conducted in the period 2014–2015.

Shivani Gupta

Kathak is considered a dance of the Northern region in India. Kathak started as a dance for upper caste Brahman men belonging to the caste called 'Brahman Kathak' which is also where the dance gets its name from. It draws from Hindu mythology and scripture and is said to explore the very complex ideology of spirituality. Kathak believes in the philosophy of advaita which means 'oneness' or whole. In the context of Kathak this implied that male Kathak dancers performed both the male and female acts of the dance. It is this argument which has enabled scholars to claim Kathak as an androgynous space. This kind of claims on performance and dance directs us towards unexplored aspects of sexuality and gender which Kathak as a dance tries to evade. Making these concerns the premise, I am exploring and examining the space that Kathak provides to women on and off stage. It is dealing with sexuality of the characters and performances where the woman is able to express male sexuality without any boundaries but while performing a female act she is constrained and remains a man's fantasy. The essay in the end discusses various possibilities of subversion to challenge and explore new spaces for the voices of women dancers.

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Kathak Dance Research Paper

Show More As a traditional dancer, we love to support our dance history and those traditional Kathak dance format represents the cultures strength, tradition and physical enthusiastic but today people are getting addict modern stylized dance. Those Kathak dancers are dying species and they are only 100-150 left today and they are part of our culture. They created our culture strong and valuable and we are losing those people day by day. It has a lot of reason behind that. They are not making good enough money today and people do not appreciate their performance they used to. On the other hand, governments are not taking care of those dance activities. This dance format name is Kathak and this dancing and gestures is the old classical format. …show more content… Kathak dancer Rehan Mahmud founder of Kathak Dance School in Plano, TX and his team are trying to develop those format and trying to modernize this format which can contain its own style but represents original dance category. This dance format also support fun activities and health education. Some people who don’t find any interest in a gym they can practice Kathak dance. This dance format is not like Ballet or Hip hop but it has its own unique style which are very slow movement head, eyes, hand, and leg. Sometimes performer performs with single and sometimes with a group. So, this dance format is full of health benefits. Kathak dancers are the traditional dancer and their dance format is kind a traditional which is also a form of dance category. For that performance dancer need black and long stage. That dancer usually use gold color crown and colorful dress and this dance format needs a heavy eye movement. Sometimes they tell a full story with their eye. They need some instruments like Tabla(drum) which way they can get their level and perform they want

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