Gurus
Types
of gurus
Level of professionalism
Parampara
Experience and age
Male vs
female gurus
Performing vs
non-performing gurus
Fake gurus
Gurus and their assistants
Guru's
specialization
Study process
Clone
dancers
How much can you learn?
Learning solo vs group dance
Gurus and students' progress
One-to-one classes vs group lessons
Arangetrams
Auxiliary practices
Entering the stage
Children vs
adult students
Continuity of the study
Schools and courses
Standards, awards and prizes
Banis and styles
Dance studio
School
's size
Students' achievements
Short (intensive) courses
Online courses
University degrees
Things to keep in
mind
Professional
Bharatanatyam careers
Choreography: copyrights, modifications and teaching
Audio
and video
Permissions
Money matters, prices and fees
Students' opinion
Extra caution
Try before you buy
Types
of gurus
Although many
learners select a guru hoping to learn as much of
Bharatanatyam as possible, still a
large number of students select their guru by some other criteria. Many
dancers
opt for a business type
guru
who, as they hope, can provide them with valuable connections,
opportunities,
influence, and teach them successful PR, fundraising and business
skills
rather than the dance technique itself. Other dancers prefer a hereditary
guru, believing that the tradition is best preserved by genes rather
than by
learning. The word guru was used originally to
mean someone
who helps you grow spiritually. Practically all of the contemporary
gurus are merely dance instructors.
Level
of professionalism
You can very
easily determine how professional your dance teacher is by finding out how
many technical elements he uses.
Ask him how many of adavus
he incorporates in the items, how many karanas,
how many talams
and ragams
he
composes in. Extremely few dancers use more than 60 adavus and 50 karanas in their recitals, and
more than a dozen
or two of talams and ragams.
The more complex talams
are the domain of the top
dancers.
Parampara
Before a guru tries to teach you something, find out if it is what his
guru
taught him or it is something that he discovered or composed by
himself. If Padma
Subramaniam or Adyar
Lakshman can reconstruct many of the 108 karanas merely by looking at the
temple statues, studying books, and
then create Bharatnrityam,
why can't you? While
some dance instructors openly admit that they no longer
adhere to the tradition, outside of India
you will
also find many gurus
teaching some form of modern dance as Bharatanatyam.
Experience
and age
It takes at least 10 years for a guru to learn to apply the teaching
methods
successfully. However, the gurus who are over 60 years old will most
likely not have the energy to correct most
of your mistakes. Unless one is practising yoga,
the aging process
is unstoppable and will degrade most of one's nritta
as well as abhinaya.
Male vs female gurus
One of the most
important choice a student is facing is whether to learn with a male or
female guru. While the male gurus can usually provide a student with a
more
rationalized and structured learning process, and better answer his
questions
of theory, still it should be mentioned that women have far richer
arsenal of abhinaya and
can explain many things in a simple
language. A female guru will be more sensitive and adaptive to your
individuality. A rule of thumb is, male
students should select male gurus, and female students should be taught
by
women gurus.
Performing vs non-performing gurus
A performing guru
will not be able to give you regular classes, and
even then your schedule should be very flexible. The students of Alarmel
Valli get to see
her very rarely. The contemporary dance seen is full of competition,
and the
gurus have human limitations. It is
vain to believe that a performing guru is going to focus on promoting
you
rather than himself. In case of non-performing gurus, if you
have not
seen his live performances, find out if you can watch these recorded on
video. Although nattuvanars
were all men, it is a fact that the training methods they used have
been
largely forgotten.
Fake
gurus
Even nowadays most
gurus frown upon any formal attestations (certificates,
diplomas, etc) for their students'. Unfortunately, due to
the
explosive proliferation of Bharatanatyam schools worldwide, there is no
established register of the
gurus' lineage, which often leads to abuse. Ask a lot of
questions
regarding your guru's parampara.
You should
find out if your guru's guru had other students besides your guru. Do
your guru's fellow students remember him? Can you talk to them? Who
was
your guru's guru's
best
student? How
many years and hours did your guru spend studying with his guru?
Gurus
and their assistants
How much of the
learning would you have to do as self-study, and how many items would
you
have to learn with a video tape? Most of the gurus, especially
the senior
gurus, delegate
99% of the teaching to their assistants. It may be ok unless you are an
advanced student.
Guru's specialization
Decades
ago many
gurus were aware of their personal limitations, were more emotionally
secure
and were not so keen on maintaining the full control over their
students'
lives and activities. After they have given a student everything they
could,
the gurus would usually send him to another guru - normally within the
same bani
- for further training. One of the
important questions that you should ask your guru is, "After a student
has studied a certain number of years and has mastered the techniques
on a
certain level, do you recommend such a student to do an additional
study with
another guru?"
Clone dancers
A typical error that many
gurus make is producing carbon
copies of themselves. Few gurus, such as Kiran Subramaniam , Sheela
Unnikrishnan or
N.Srikanth, focus on developing
their students' individual
interpretations and performing styles. You should watch at
least 3-4
performances by the guru's senior (post-arangetram) students at
a close range and see how different
they are. There are children-only schools such as Bharathanjali, where
the students are specifically tutored to become clones of their gurus
even in mukha abhinaya, which often results in various
personality disorders.
How
much can you learn?
Check how your guru has planned your lessons at least a year ahead, so
that
you can compare it with other guru's. A good guru should have a
more-or-less clear idea of how much a particular student is capable of
learning within a year. If you are an advanced student, a good guru
should be
able to teach you at least one full margam
in a year if you have at least 3 classes a
week and practise at home too. Check how
many students of your guru have been brought to the mastery level.
Learning
solo vs group dance
Unless you are
planning your dancing career as part of corps de ballet in a fusion dance
company, it
should be said that without mastering many
advanced solo
items and without regular solo
performances you will never be able to establish
yourself as an independent Bharatanatyam dancer.
Bharatanatyam
proper is a solo dance. In a good school,
at least 80% of the regular
classes should be dedicated
to learning solo items.
Gurus
and students' progress
The problem that many highly talented students
face is that their guru artificially hampers
their
progress by teaching them too slowly
(otherwise, the other students in the school would feel
bad, as they cannot learn as quickly),
restricting their public solo
performances to a minimum that is sufficient to draw new
students into the school. The best students
are often discouraged by their guru's praising the incapable
students in front of them. Some students still manage to
make considerable progress despite their gurus'
efforts. Find out how
many students have exceeded their guru's mastery. Some gurus, such as
Chitra
Visveswaran, privately
admit that they do not pass all of
their knowledge even to their most advanced students simply because the
guru can
best maintain control over them by
limiting their growth. Due to the competition, some gurus do not want
their
senior assistants to start totally independent
dance schools.
One-to-one classes vs
group lessons
While one-to-one
classes are better for those who have reached a mastery level and have
a lot
of self-discipline, the group lessons are preferable in most cases, as students
learn a lot from each other. If you are one of
those students who are
studying Bharatanatyam not merely as a hobby, you will not learn much
unless
there are at least 2-3 other students in your batch that are as good as
or
better than you are. Optimally, the group should have 5-10 students.
Arangetrams
For
anybody who
considers dancing as a professional career, it should be known that
arangetram is the guru's formal
endorsement of the student's reaching a certain mastery
level.
Check how many students of your guru
have done their arangetrams. If possible, watch
2-3 arangetrams of the guru's students and see if
they are all up to a certain standard.
Warning: check if by joining the school you automatically become a "bonded" student with a mandatory (and pricey) arangetram (any long-term contracts should be avoided). Some gurus, such as Madurai Muralidharan, do not let their students leave the ir school without a scandal unless they finish their arangetram.
Auxiliary
practices
Learning Carnatic music, especially vocal
music, was mandatory in times of devadasis.
A good
guru will make sure that his students practise many auxiliary exercises
that
would improve their stamina, flexibility, balance, strength,
expressiveness, concentration,
etc. Usually, many of these exercises are from yoga or martial arts
such as kalari payattu. See if and how your
guru teaches pranayamas and meditation too. Many large schools, such as Urmila
Sathyanarayanan's, Padma Subrahmaniam's, Hema Rajan's, provide the
integrated yoga and vocal training to their students.
Entering
the stage
Check if your
guru lets any of his students, regardless of their mastery, give live
performances as long as they pay the expenses. Some serious gurus like
Padma Subramaniam or Chitra Visveswaran
usually maintain certain minimum quality standards
for
those students who give live performances.
Children vs
adult students
It is common to
see both children and adults in the same group of learners. Some gurus,
like Anita Guha,
only teach young children and teenages, and
do not offer any professional level training. Some gurus
like Chitra Visveswaran
do not teach
young children at all, as it is much less profitable financially.
Children, though,
have far larger arsenal of abhinaya,
and a good
guru, such as Sheela Unnikrishnan, develops
his creativity out of the children's
interpretations. The gurus who do not teach children usually tend to
produce clone dancers.
Continuity
of the study
See if the school
has a summer break or the December music season break. If the break is
longer
than 1 month, it will noticeably put your progress back. If you are
planning
a long break of 1 year or more, you should know even you will
never be able to recover many of your skills and individual
expressions even if you later spend many years of rigorous
practise trying
to gain even of your former shape back.
Standards,
awards and prizes
A typical question is,
"How good is this school?". One of the obvious criteria is
the number
and the kind
of the awards, titles and prizes that a particular school's students
have won. Awards, titles and prizes largely indicate the dancer's place
in the hierarchy
of the Bharatanatyam community. These awards can be classified in 4 main
categories: local (city) level, district (county) level,
regional (state) level and national level. Some competitions, such as Kerala's
Higher Secondary Youth Festival, or the competition conducted
by BSNL Cultural and Sports Wing, are multi-level, and, thus are
considered as more serious. Needless to say, a professional dancer will
never state in his resume any school-level prizes and awards.
Although
many competitions are advertised as national-level,
they may not attract any contestants outside the city where it is held.
For obvious reasons
(with three quarters of the world's Bharatanatyam students concentrated
in Chennai) it has to be noted that winning a
city-level Bharatanatyam competition in Chennai is considered far more
prestigeous than winning the all-European Bharatanatyam competition. If
you win a prize, be ready to answer the question, "Who were the
judges?". Naturally, the status of the competition
will be higher if it has on its panel of judges an experienced
Bharatanatyam critic such as The Hindu's Nandini Ramani, while the
awards from a local bank or a Rotary club will most likely not make
your Bharatanatyam resume sound impressive, just as the "Bharatanatyam"
awards from a local temple or a religious organization such as ISKCON
or TTD,
where you can find teenage
judges who judge their own students.
The
titles conferred by the Central Government, such as Padmashree and Balashree, are
considered as purely political,
as the political awards are made
behind the closed doors, without revealing either the candidate selection criteria,
or the final title
awarding criteria. Thus, Chennai's Indian Fine Arts
Society's prizes or Music Academy's titles, where only a few
hand-picked candidates are allowed to compete, are considered as
political. On the other hand, Chennai's Music Connoiseurs Club's open
Bharatanatyam competitions attract over 150 contestants. With the
recent explosive proliferation of various sabhas and dance-related
institutions, the titles awarded by the older sabhas, such as Chennai's
Narada Gana or Krishna Gana sabhas, are certainly more "prestigeous",
even though purely political in nature.
Very
few competitions, such as Kerala's
Higher Secondary Youth Festival, provide for an appeal procedure
based on the video records. Such appeal procedures have often
revealed cases of open bribery or blatant
intimidation of
the judges, and resulted in scandals. The appeal procedures are not
supported by the majority of the sabhas, as such a procedure
is likely to embarass the judges and damage their
reputation.
Banis and styles
One of the main reasons that all titles, awards
and prizes in Bharatanatyam have a very limited value is obvious: a Vazhuvoor-style dancer will not
score high marks with a Kalakshetra-style judge. What is
considered as wrong in one style is
likely to be considered as correct
in another. All of the
existing banis
of Bharatanatyam are less than 200 years old, and originated either
from the
devadasi traditions (e.g. Balasawaswaty's
style, Melattur, Kanchipuram, etc)
or from the rajanarthaki's art (e.g. Thanjavur, Pandanallur,
Mysore, etc). See how
strictly your guru
has been following a particular tradition. It is a fact that two
gurus
claiming to be from the same lineage can be vastly different in their
styles.
While some sub-styles are very complex, the others, like the Kalakshetra, are simplified
and westernized derivatives. A Bharatanatyam style
is only as much classical
as it adheres to the Natya Shastra's guidelines and techniques. The transition
between the orthodox classical to
the pop is continuous. Padma
Subrahmaniam's school will teach you all the 108
karanas, although Chitra Visveswaran's school will not
teach you even 10%
of these but instead
you will learn many elements of the English ballet tradition. If you
prefer to learn Martha Graham's ballet technique, you should learn it
from Sudharani
Raghupathi. You will find many artsy
Bollywood-style
elements in Shobana's
or Saroja
Vaidyanathan's technique. While Kuchipudi is very closely
related to Bharatanatyam so
that their study can be easily combined, combining with other styles
such as Odissi may be
problematic (unless you
are an Alarmel Valli), as certain patterns of
movement may interfere with each other. Your abhinaya
will be Kathakali-like
if you learn Bharatanatyam with the Dhananjayans.
If you want to learn Bharatanatyam to become an actress in Tamil
popular movies, you should learn abhinaya from Kalanidhi Narayan or
from Shobana.
Dance
studio
Make sure that there is at least 4 sq m of space per every student in
case of
group lessons. Your feet will not be damaged if you practise on the
wooden
floor. Make sure the studio is well-ventilated. Air-conditioning is a
plus.
School's
size
You will not be able
to get enough personal attention if you study in a school of 200
students, unless you can afford to take one-to-one classes there. Many
large schools, such as Krishnakumari Narendran's Abinaya Natyalaya or Anita Guha's Bharathanjali, are
well-known for their children's group ballets, but few of their top
students ever give solo
performances as it could discourage the majority, less
capable, students, according to the gurus' opinion. In large schools, there are clearly defined hierachical groups that are treated (and trained) very differently. Many of
such schools' best students quit after learning for 2-3
years.
From a large school's
guru's point of view, a group performance is a good source
of profit (even if a student's part is 1
minute long, this student will be required to pay a
significant amount towards "the expenses of the
programme"), and is the only way to increase
the number of mediocre or incapable but well-paying
students in the school and make them feel good on the
stage.
While large,
commercialized
institutions usually have the advantage of providing the students with
better
learner resources (library of books and videos), accommodation,
transportation, etc, the smaller schools
have quite a different, family-like atmosphere, where each student is
treated as individual.
Students'
achievements
A school can be
also judged by how many solo
performances its
top students give. Check how
many students of your guru have done their arangetrams. Can
you watch these videos and see the standards? How many dropouts
does the school have in a year's time? Short (intensive) courses An
increasing number of students learn under many gurus for a very short
time, while on a short visit. Whether it is a week-long workshop or a
few months of a special training, you should understand that most gurus
treat such cases merely as a business opportunity, i.e. the rule that the more a student pays, the more attention he gets becomes very prominent. You may learn an entire margam in a month's time. Well, really? Don't have any illusions: money cannot buy you the mastery. It takes hundreds of hours of supervised rehearsals and countless corrections in order to polish the smallest nuances of the movements. If you are already on the advanced level, you can quickly learn the sketch, the outline of a dance sequence, but it takes years of observations of many dancers doing this sequence, and many years of polishing the intricate details.
Online
courses
Recently, some
institutions started offering online programmes not only as a theory
courses but as practical courses too.
Unfortunately, practically all of these are of little or no value, as
they do
not offer any real online lessons as a
live interaction with the guru through video conferencing.
University
degrees
These have only
recently become available for anyone who might be interested in
obtaining a
university degree in Bharatanatyam if he is planning his career as
a scholar or researcher rather than a
performer. Unfortunately, practically all of such degrees as
of 2006 are of
dubious value and are not easily recognized/accredited by most
institutions. Some
universities offer correspondence courses.
Professional
Bharatanatyam careers
99%
of all Bharatanatyam students never become professional dancers or
gurus because learning Bharatanatyam on a professional level is as
time-consuming as learning ballet. This is the reason that the dancers
who list in their resumes a Master's degree in Computer Science,
Business Administration or Medicine do not stand a chance of reaching
the professional level in Bharatanatyam. Performing or even teaching
Bharatanatyam alone as a career is an extremely difficult path and
requires significant investments of time, energy and money.
Giving
performances at various festivals and sabhas is a requisite for
establishing a professional Bharatanatyam career. To
be eligible for an award from a sabha, the dancer is supposed to give a
few performances under its banner. For each performance in India the
dancer is to pay a cash
"donation" to the sabha if the performance is to be under its official umrella, which may easily come up to Rs.40000 (current tariff at Sri Krishna Gana Sabha) during the Margazhi season. Otherwise the dancer can perform without the "umbrella" and simply pay the "rent" of the auditorium. The cash "donation", however, is most often to denote a separate amount which is rarely disclosed not only to the public but also to the Indian Tax authorities. As you may have already guessed it, the dancer who pays the largest amount will most likely be conferred this sabha's awards and titles. The current "donation" amount may range from as
little as Rs.2000 to many lakhs of rupees.
Choreography: copyrights, modifications and teaching
Find out how your would-be guru is treating his items and copyrights. How does he react when other dance schools' students copy this guru's choreography. There are gurus who do not allow their students to modify the "original choreography". Some gurus will not even allow their senior students to earn any money by teaching this "original choreography" independently, or other gurus may require their.senior students to pay a certain "franchise" fee (commission) from their indepentent teaching activities.
Audio,
video and TV
Ideally, the music
must be custom-made to suit a particular dancer, but not everybody can
afford to pay for a live orchestra every time. A senior
guru like Sudharani
Raghupati will
charge even an Indian student at least Rs.25000 for a solo
recital with her son's live orchestra. As of 2008, the
average expenses for a high-class 5-member orchestra ranges from
Rs.7000 to Rs.10000 in Chennai. Different schools have different
policies regarding their audio and video.Check if the guru gives you an
option to employ the orchestra of your selection. While some liberal
schools provide the audio tapes (usually, recorded at live
programmes, and, thus, of poor quality) free
of cost to all their students, you may not get any audio
for home practice if you join some other schools that have many
restrictions. A professional-level school provides its students -
either free or at a very nominal fee - with high-quality
audio CD's recorded at a studio.
In some schools the
students are not allowed to make a copy of their fellow students'
programmes' video recordings. Many schools have a complex set of rules
that cover every aspect of video shooting and TV appearances. Getting
permissions from your guru may be very complicated.
Permissions
While most gurus
will readily give you blessings for you to take part in a dance
festival,
show, competition, TV, film or video production, there are some gurus,
such
as Padma
Subramaniam, who
hardly ever give such permissions to her students. This is often one of
the methods
of artificially
hampering a student's progress and dancing career. A
selfish
guru will not let his students do anything unless he too can personally
profit from it.
Money matters, prices and
fees
Find
out how many
students in your guru's school are studying for free.
While the
commercialized gurus like Sudharani
Raghupati say that,
"Nothing comes cheap. Everything in
the world has a price", a true guru
will believe that not everything can be bought, and will be teaching at
least a few exceptionally
talented students without asking for a tuition fee. Fees
per class can vary from as low
as Rs.10 in rural India
to USD
$50 in California. If you decide to join Madurai Muralidharan's school, be prepared to spend a minimum of Rs.3,50,000 for the mandatory arangetram.Your total arangetram
expenses with Chitra
Visveswaran may go up
to Rs.4,00,000. The students of the commercialized gurus usually have group arangetrams, where the total amount is split between the students.
It is no wonder that some
schools have turned into elite business clubs where you can
hardly find any outstanding dancers. Even in Harvard University a certain number of
students are
admitted purely on the merit basis. Most
Bharatanatyam gurus will be very cautious discussing the financial
issues as they operate in the black market,
i.e. the students are required to pay in cash because the gurus do not
declare this money in their income tax declarations. Many expensive and
greedy gurus will not quote the tuition amount
or other costs, but will expect the student
to suggest the amount that he or she is willing to pay. If the amount
received is below the guru's expectation, such a student will not
receive much attention, and may eventually be politely forced to leave
the school "voluntarily".
Students'
opinion
See if you can speak to the guru's current
and especially former students directly
and privately.
Find out the reasons why some students leave the school.
Is the guru aware of
these reasons?
Extra
caution
Find out
everything that is going to be mandatory, e.g. arangetram. Make sure your guru is not going to force you to give donations
to
certain organizations, etc. A few gurus, such as Urmila
Sathyanarayanan, will
threaten to terminate your study if you do not attend most of
her other
students' performances. Check if a guru forces his students
to worship a certain dubious saint or idol.
Some gurus, for instance,
force their students to celebrate the Puttaparti's
Sai Baba's
birthdays and offer him prayers.
The established practice is,
you may refuse to do
anything if you are a paying student. If you are
studying for free you will
be expected to always obey your guru's commands.
Try
before you buy
Ask if it would
be possible to observe a lesson before making a commitment to join the
dance
school. See how and how often the guru
corrects the students' mistakes.
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