Sonal Nimkar

Research Fellow

Balvant Parekh Centre for General Semantics & Other Human Sciences

Residency notes and notes from

Towards the Ontology of Dance: A Phenomenological Approach

As a dancer and researcher my attempt is to understand and study the movement practice of the Indic region to build an ontology of dance. I am looking at movement from the Vaishesika perspective. I.e. I trace the motion of mind of the dancer in a movement from a first person perspective.

This study will help me to understand the karanas of the Nāṭyaśāstra as I feel it will have semblance with it. The study will uncover the nature of motion, pause, time and space. So once this is done then this can be compared with the karanas of Abhinavabharati text, a commentary on Nāṭyaśāstra given by Abhinavagupta which was also written around that time.

This study which is ongoing can be said that is the study of pause. To understand motion it is important/necessary to understand pause too. How does one understand pause and how motion, space and time is expressed in this pause? I am also interested in knowing how time and space was construed 1000 years back. For this I notate the embodied experience of these sculptures.

It is through these still sculptures I am making an attempt to understand the movement of yore, karanas of the Nāṭyaśāstra.

When a phenomenological account or the first person account of the conscious experience of the moving body of the bharatnatyam aḍavu movements was given, it was noticed that there was an appearance of certain structures. These structures were SHIFT, PUSH, LIFT, STRETCH, SLIP, FOLD etc. and were collectively named as Movement Words. These movement words showed the exact nature of the particular movement and work as a building block to build an ontology. Till coming to Last Ship Khajuraho I had notated the motion of a movement of Bharatnatyam aḍavus and had 400+ manas figures notated.

Now my next step was to study the movement practice of the Indic region. And the best source of this is the Nāṭyaśāstra.

Every movement is the culmination of ‘motion’ and ‘pause’. To study the motion I rely on the text Nāṭyaśāstra to reconstruct the movement and then trace the motion in the mind of the dancer as a lived experience. One of the ways the pause can be studied is by giving the phenomenological account of the sculptures.

Sculptures show an exact nature of human movement. These sculptures, among them the sculptures of the Khajuraho temples, are the movements frozen in time which are immortalized in the stone. Though distinct in their own right these highly stylized sculptures show remarkable semblance with contemporary Indian classical dance postures. The use of sauṣṭhava, hastas (hand gestures) and sthānakas (leg postures) bear a high resemblance with Indian classical dance. Given that the source of dance movements is the Nāṭyaśāstra and the source of sculptures are the Śilpaśāstras, what comes to mind is the need to probe the common source of thought of these two distinct art forms.

What can be the basis of this? Both, the dancer and the sculptor deal with human body. This human body is the tool of expression for both of them. They take the responsibility to express the bhāva (emotion) through language of movement using human body and the plastic medium. Both of them bring out the inner meaning. This effort to express the subtle bhāva is guided by the principles of dance and sculpture.

While an iconographic image of man is codified in the compositional technique of sūtra, māna, tāla and bhaṁga in the Silpaśāstra; body in Indian dance is also reduced to primary units of aṁga-s and upāṁga-s as per the canons of the Nāṭyaśāstra. Bharatmuni has further given movement to these primary units of aṁga-s and upāṁga-s and with different permutations and combinations a unique vocabulary of hasta-s, cārī-s, karaṇa-s have evolved. My research aims to study these rules to understand the nature and manifestation of movement in sculptures and correlate it with the dance terminology of Bharata.

Further as movement words are known as motion frames, sculptures can also be understood as still frames. These sculptures can be notated as an embodied experience of pause which can open the movement possibility that is before and after that posture and also help to understand what are the inner attitudes while being in that position.

Thus the study of sculptures is the study of body in pause.

So the question would be what kind of movement possibility does this pause have? As we have movement words can we have pause words also?

My inquiry is to understand the purpose of movement in dance, and parallelism in it. The questions that I am typically looking at are -

  1. What is this idea of movement?

  2. What is movement in dance?

  3. Can there be universals of dance with which any dance form can be explained?

  4. What is the nature of movement, particularly Indic?

  5. What is the nature of pause and motion in it?

  6. What are the expressions of time, space and emotion in a movement? How is movement conceived and visualized by classical Indian sculptors and what is its relevance to modern day Indian classical dance particularly Bharatnāṭyam?

Khajuraho is a UNESCO heritage site, which has many temples that have intricately carved sculptures. These temples are almost thousand years old. I have documented the sculptures of these temples when I was there as part of the residency and now I am studying them.