eternal dancing

The eternal dance of India. It was born thousands of years ago, with the story of Shiva and the Creation but its style is still fresh, as though the art had been discovered only yesterday.

In India, dancing came very early in history. A small bronze figure, commonly thought to be a dancer, dates from the Indus Valley culture at Mohenjo-Daro, more than two thousand years before Christ. About the first century A.D. the minute details of dance routines, along with their underlying dramatic principles, were laid down in a book known as the Bharata Natya Shastra; and since then the precepts of Indian classical dance have not substantially altered. Without any doubt, it is the oldest surviving civilized dance form in the world. Yet Indian dancing is as vital and exciting as if it had been invented yesterday.

Most of us in the West have grown up far from the sounds of indian music, with its strange scales and difficult rhythms, of which the dramatic cycle of the Indian year, punctuated by torrential monsoon rains, is unknown, and of which the legends and folk tales of India are not the typical backdrop of life which all means that at first sight, the dancing sculptures and the dance itself is apt to be baffling. It offers the thrill of the unfamiliar, but we lack the data to enlarge and deepen the experience much the same as an Indian on his first vsit to a Western ballet performance being equally at a loss.

The Indian dance and dancing figures are best understood by means of a single, if complex, master key-the myth of the god Shiva creating and destroying through interminable aeons of cyclic time. Unlike many great dance forms, Indian dance began- and in its pure forms continued- as a religious performance, in contrast to the mystery plays of medieval Europe which developed into non-religious dramatic art.