Diaspora dance: Bharata Natyam's evolution. (News).

If a dance tradition is very, very old, you can respect it and agree never ever to alter it--or. you can respect it and vow to make it new by ushering change into it. When Chicago played host to several hundred bharata natyam dancers and their fans this fall, perspectives from both camps were well represented.

"My idea of tradition is constant change," confided Chandralekha, a legendary pioneer of Indian dance and a respected voice of the Indian countercultural movement, to a rapt audience near the conclusion of the Chicago conference, "Bharata Natyam in the Diaspora," held from September 6 to 9. "I don't think I ever arrive at any dance that is a finished product. Dance is like nature--it must continue to grow," she added.

Scrutinizing growth and change in bharata natyam, a 3,000-year-old South Indian classical dance art, was a goal of the conference, which attracted bharata natyam dancers, students, teachers, critics, scholars, and dance presenters from India, England, Europe, Canada, and the U.S. Each had his or her own idea of what bharata natyam is--and what it should become.

"We're not all going to see this in the same way," cautioned Bonnie Brooks, chair of The Dance Center of Columbia College Chicago. Columbia cohosted the conference with Natya Dance Theatre, a bharata natyam company and school founded twenty-six years ago by Indian-born dancer, choreographer, and teacher Hema Rajagopalan. Rajagopalan came up with the idea for the conference with Joan Erdman, professor of anthropology and the humanities at Columbia.

As Brooks suggested, reinterpretation is inevitable and yet still controversial for any dance with a long history. In Chicago, some bharata natyam dancers from India differed in their vision of the dance from Indian dancers now living in the West--the diaspora. The conference's strength was to bring contrary points of view into close and sustained contact for panel discussions, workshops, and performances by Malavika Sarukkai, Chandralekha and Company, and Natya Dance Theatre, as well as performances by many new dancers.

Among the new was Parijat Desai, based in Los Angeles. Her tensely fluid dances showed the influence of bharata natyam, modern dance, yoga, and even ballet. Desai explained her unusual fusion: "What draws me to bharata natyam is the linear clarity, from the edge of your fingertips through the whole body--but I feel constrained by the position of the body in bharata natyam. Reality is innumerable intersections." Uttara Coorlawala of New York City agreed with her. "A real dancer wants to explore more than the rules of bharata natyam," Coorlawala said.

But members of the senior generation of bharata natyam dancers in India and their followers expressed mixed feelings about the merits of innovation. "I don't understand why many practitioners of bharata natyam want a change," objected C.V. Chandrasekhar, formerly dean of performing arts at the Maharaja Sayajirao University of Baroda in central India. Leela Venkataraman, dance critic for The Hindu, urged, "You can bring bharata natyam forward and do new things with it, but please do not change it beyond recognition."

"All the gurus have more or less vanished from the scene," observed writer Sandanand Menon, a close associate of Chandralekha. He declared, "We will have to invent a new bharata natyam."