Festival will spotlight Indian dance

(Credit: Tyler Bissmeyer/Special to The Courier-Journal)

Akila Iyer wants you to know: What you see in Westernized Bollywood movies like “Bride & Prejudice” or “Slumdog Millionaire” is not traditional Indian dance.

“Bollywood draws from everything — it’s a combination of anything that is popular,” said Iyer, the founder of Guru Vandana Academy, a dance school in Louisville.

By contrast, the type of dance Iyer teaches traces its roots back over 2,000 years to texts called “The Scripture of Dance.” Those ancient texts outlined a set of movements that have evolved into the classical dance form known as Bharatanatyam.

This weekend, students from Iyer’s Guru Vandana Academy, as well as the Nrithyashala School of Dance in Louisville and dancers from Missouri and Michigan, will perform over two days in an event celebrating Bharatanatyam at the Ursuline Arts Center (3114 Lexington Road). Accompanying the dancers, musicians from India will perform classical vocal and instrumental music.

Bharatanatyam is a narrative medium. It has its own language of hand gestures and steps that dancers use to tell mythological and sacred stories. Originally, Bharatanatyam was practiced only in Hindu temples as a means of teaching the stories to worshippers who couldn’t necessarily read.

“It is a way for a commoner to be with God without having to learn scriptures, chant and do services,” Iyer explained.

But modern Bharatanatyam doesn’t limit itself to Hindu stories or to dancers of Indian descent. According to Iyer, the form can accommodate stories or myths from anyone’s tradition.

Students at local dance schools like Iyer’s learn the foundations of physical expressiveness, rhythm, steps and storytelling — but it can take years to master the form. Her school offers an intensive summer session whose daily program includes yoga, practicing basic steps and learning dance theory, all before lunch.

“Bharatanatyam is extremely traditional and known for its great purity and grace and tenderness,” said Smitha Paily, founder of Louisville’s Natya Kendra Dance Academy, which is not affiliated with the program this weekend. “It’s a dance of mind and soul.”

Paily has studied Bharatanatyam for 25 years, performing around the United States and in Canada as well as India. Her students performed at Mayor Greg Fischer’s inauguration and held a recital in May at Kentucky Country Day School with proceeds going to the WHAS Crusade for Children.

“Even though this particular form has gone through lots of changes, it still has its roots deep in the religious and rich mythological heritage of India,” Paily said.

For Iyer, the idea to hold a festival highlighting Bharatanatyam has been gestating for years. But when she traveled to Cleveland in April for a large festival of Indian classical dance, she wished her students could be there to see what dancers elsewhere in the country are doing.

“You can’t bring the whole town (to Cleveland), but you can bring artists here,” she said.

Like all immigrant groups, Indian-Americans face the challenge of maintaining their heritage as their children grow up steeped in Western culture.

“I think it will encourage the local community to take more pride in their heritage,” Iyer said of the festival. She also hopes to attract an audience of Louisvillians outside the Indian-American community.

“The way we think (of) dance and what Western dance is, it’s a huge difference,” she said. “There’s a huge gap to bridge.” Iyer hopes that this event can help build that bridge.