Each year at Dance India we aim to improve our course offering with an interesting mix of lecture-demonstrations, debates, discussions and workshops.
Our hope is that along with the high quality training students will receive from some of the world’s greatest dancers, these additional sessions will contribute to the making of a versatile, engaged and well-rounded dancer.
The Natya Shastra is an ancient Indian text on the performing arts, encompassing theatre, dance and music and is incredibly wide in its scope. While it primarily deals with stagecraft, it has come to influence music, classical Indian dance, and literature as well. It covers stage design, music, dance, make up and virtually every other aspect of stagecraft in great detail, allowing an artist to truly understand and discover the meaning behind every mudra (hand gesture), posture, facial movement and more.
This mini-course series will be conducted over 5 sessions. Over the course of the week students will benefit from a bird’s eye view of all 36 chapters of the Natya Shastra as well as an introduction to Rasa theory.
To teach the course, we are delighted to be welcoming Dr.Pappu Venugopal Rao to Dance India UK family this year. Dr. Rao is a well-known scholar, poet, musicologist, dance expert, writer and orator with more than twenty books on various subjects to his credit. After 32 years of service as an academic administrator with the American Institute of Indian Studies, Dr. Rao now holds many important portfolios within prominent institutions.
He is co-ordinator of the Sri Venkateswara Bhakti Channel of Tirumala Tirupathi Devasathanams. He also lectures on music, dance and literature and conducts workshops on the Natya Shastra all over the world, including Harvard University. Dr. Rao has received high critical acclaim and and equal amount of appreciation from artists and rasikas (art enthusiasts).
We launched this brilliant series in Dance India Asia Pacific 2013 and are thrilled to be able to offer it to our UK participants as well.