“Eka Samaiya…..” Once upon a time are the magic words that begin old stories.  

In India, hundreds of years before the Moguls arrived, Kathakas traveled from village to village telling the old stories, the “kathas”, through word, music, and movement.  We can imagine the stories of the young cowherd Krishna and his beloved Radha in the forest of Brindavan.  The wealthy land-owners patronized them.  They performed for Rajas (Kings) and their Rani’s (Queens).  Artists painted pictures of the stories and idealized and beautified them and passed down a perfect vision.

When the Moguls arrived in India the dance form looked beautiful to them but they had their stories and were not interested in the story-telling tradition of the dance form.  They invited the dancers to their courts and applauded the footwork, spins, pure dance pieces and by doing so directed the Kathakas away from their storytelling origins into a more pure dance form.  Rhythm became important.  Footwork became dazzling.  Spins became refined.  Costuming continued to evolve with the eye of the patron in mind (see Costuming tab).  As the British rule replaced the Moguls, India’s many small kingdoms were taken over by wealthy landowners allied to the British.  Despite the political climate, the dancers continued to delight.  They remembered and reinvented the old Kavits (story poems) about the Gods in the Hindu pantheon, their human avatars and their loves.

A Kathak performance today will be rich in this history.  It will begin with invocations to the earth, the gods, the dance guru (teacher), and the audience.  The invocation dedicated to Lord Ganesh, the elephant headed god, is a rhythmic poem which removes obstacles and brings success. Then it moves into slow pure dance;  the Thath’s and Uthans show you standing and sitting postures.  The Tihais (motion repeated 3 times) highlight the rhythmic cycles and the hand mudras bring refinement and subtlety. Pure dance compositions with precise moves , footwork and spins, compositions made with a hint of movements from the natural world; animals, flowers, rain, lightening, thunder, the sun all danced while never losing a beat of the rhythmic cycle. There will be romance and its longing, old traditional narratives from the Epics, stunning rhythms in taranas, thought provoking philosophical ideas.

Everything is accompanied by instrumental and vocal melody, rhythm instruments and spoken syllables of the dance moves.