The Divine Dance

Through the vibrant and spirited art of Indian classical dance, Western yogis have found a new way to connect with traditional Indian culture.

By Shiva Rea

A single female dancer emerges from the darkness of the stage. Her presence is immediately captivating, the air suddenly fragrant with her appearance. Adorned in jewels from head to toe, radiant in a special red and gold sari, her long dark hair crowned in jasmine, she is the embodiment of the divine feminine, mirroring the images of goddesses from Lakshmi to Saraswati one sees everywhere in India. She begins her dance with an offering: With her hands in Namaste (Anjali Mudra), she dances her way to the altar to release a river of flowers over the golden image of Nataraja, the Lord of the Dance. The rhythm begins. "Ta ka dhi mi taka dhe," a singer chants to the beat of a two-sided drum. Her dance unfolds from that moment in a spiral of complex movements driven by rhythmic foot patterns, precise hand gestures, and facial expressions arrested in sculpted postures in which time stops for a moment before the rhythm begins again. Even though her story is not familiar to me, I am lost in the grace of every expression and the pure stamina of her dance, which builds and releases through movement and stillness until, in a final crescendo of rhythmic fire, it ends in the stance of Shiva as Nataraja: her left leg crossed in front of her and extended to her right, as is her graceful left arm, while the right hand forms the Abhaya Mudra, which says, "Have no fear."

With that encounter, I first fell in love with the world of Indian classical dance some 12 years ago while studying at Delhi University. I had come to India as a student of both anthropology and Ashtanga Yoga, ready to immerse myself in Indian culture. After being blown away by an evening concert featuring all the many styles of Indian classical dance—Bharata Natayam, Odissi, Kuchipudi, Kathakali, Kathak, Mohini Attam, and Manipuri—I found my way to an Odissi dance class at the Triveni Kala Sangam in New Delhi. It was here that I experienced the yoga of dance: postures, known as karanas, that reminded me of yogic standing poses in their grounding through open hips and strong legs; an intense concentration, as my awareness was asked to be everywhere at once; and an underlying relationship to the body and movement as a sacred means of unifying the Self. My study of dance started to transform my experience of Ashtanga Yoga; I started to push less and feel more, using the form to cultivate a unified consciousness and an inner grace.

Dance and Yoga: The Divine Connection

In the Hindu tradition, gods and goddesses dance as a way of expressing the dynamic energy of life. The image of Nataraja represents the god of gods, Shiva, as the Lord of the Dance, choreographing the eternal dance of the universe as well as more earthly forms such as Indian classical dance (which is said to have originated from his teachings). In Hindu mythology Shiva is also Yogiraj, the consummate yogi, who is said to have created more than 840,000 asanas, among them the hatha yoga poses we do today. While a cultural outsider may not relate to these mythic dimensions in a literal way, dancers in India revere the divine origins of their dances, which were revealed to the sage Bharata and transcribed by him into the classic text on dance drama, the Natya Shastra (circa 200 c.e.). What many practitioners of yoga do not know is that one of the central texts of yoga, Patanjali's Yoga Sutra, written around the same time, was also inspired by an encounter with Nataraja.

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