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Abhinaya Festival Australia

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22.01.2022 Photos by Anish Menon

19.01.2022 Moments frozen in time from the Abhinaya Festival workshops and lecture demonstrations! ThanksSilent Panda Pictures for the collage!

14.01.2022 and this little girl did miracle, she was so restrained, so poised and so much herself, there was a self presence in her, which is a rare phenomena commented the renowned art critic Manjari Sinha about Sandra Pisharody’s dance at a recent Delhi concert At Abhinaya Festival Sandra Pisharody will present the new Mohiniyattam choreography of Guru Nirmala Panicker based on Sree Narayana Guru's poem 'Kundalini Pattu'. Excerpts from the interview of Nirmala Panicker in The ...Hindu about the premiere of the dance piece: It was the late Guru Nitya Chaitanya Yati who first suggested choreographing ‘Kundalini Pattu.’ At that point in time, I did not know how to go about it. I began working on ‘Kundalini Pattu’ around two to three years ago, Nirmala Panicker says. Awakening the Kundalini in one’s body is the underlying message of the item. According to the concept, the primal energy lies coiled up like a snake and slowly rises up from that position to enter the spine. This dance piece is also a part of my spiritual seeking, says Nirmala

11.01.2022 Abhinaya and MAQ presents an informal evening of Bharathanatyam and Odissi with eminent artist Sooraj Subramaniam at 5:00 pm on Sunday, 8th March 2020.

08.01.2022 Before modern times took over, what did Malayali girls do in their youthful years? Well, they painted the nature, learnt music and played Veena; danced around oil lamps, and wandered around torchards, made garlands from wild flowers and occasionally cast an eye on the dark-skinned village lads with chiselled body walking around in white Malmal loin clothes! Come the monsoon, the land of Malayalam turns into infinite number of tiny islands criss-crossed by swelling rivers, cre...Continue reading

07.01.2022 Moments from the workshops and lecture demonstrations of the week-long Abhinaya Festival 2019!

06.01.2022 Abhinaya Festival- updated final version Thanks Silent Panda Pictures for the beautiful showreel tailored to the finest detail!

06.01.2022 Abhinaya festival had a majestic start with the Carnatic Music and Bharathanatyam workshops. The Carnatic Music and Bharathanatyam participants will be performing at Abhinaya Festival on Saturday the 11th. Therr are a few seats remaining to be sold, if you don't want to miss out grab your tickets right now. https://www.trybooking.com/book/event?eid=481177

05.01.2022 Abhinaya Festival 2019 showreel. Thanks again to all stakeholders!

05.01.2022 Workshop sessions, lecture demonstrations and training progressing at the week-long Abhinaya Festival for grand finale performances on Saturday 11th May, 2019 by lead exponents Kapila Venu, Parshwanath Upadhye, Sudev Warrier, Sandra Pisharody and Australian exponents and musicians Bindu Rajendren, Kiran Varma, Murali Ramakrishnan, Sridhar Chari, Aswin Narayanan and workshop particiants. We have closed the sales of tickets through Abhinaya team now. If you want to grab one of the few remaining seats give it a try through Trybooking. https://www.trybooking.com/book/event?eid=481177

03.01.2022 Some thousand years ago, the southern tip of Indian peninsula was a land called Tamilagam with a beautiful language. Go forward many centuries as if in a time l...apse video, parts of the land evolved into distinct cultures, each unique and beautiful in its own ways. East of the western ghats, in the current Tamil Nadu, the civilization successfully defended in its long running Tamil lineage form time immemorial and fiercely fought invasions be it the Aryans of the past or more recent attempts to fight Hindi as a national language. The narrow strip of land in the west of Western Ghats was different. The buffer offered by the Western Ghats probably made any foreign arrival less of an invasion and more of a cultural exchange. Be it the arrival of Vedic Sanskrit from the north, St Thomas from the west or Arabs through the sea with ship loads of gold in exchange of spices, the land of Kerala imbibed it all and made it part of their identity. The buffer offered by Western Ghats was significant. Religious or political conflicts like Shaiva-Vaishnava, Maratha-Mughal etc. that resulted in significant bloodshed in the northern heartlands didn’t do as much damage into Kerala. No less were the influence of visionary philosophers and poets who fused and blended even conflicting ideologies into singular concepts that were acceptable to the broader cross-section of the society despite caste, creed and political inclinations. The greatest among those poets of Kerala that we saw in the last century was Sree Narayana Guru. Guru’s Kundalini Pattu is deceptively simple with very common Malayalam words one may overlook it as a simple Malayalam folklore song. Guru beautifully merges two gigantic philosophical traditions of India, the Vedantic and Tantric, and simply puts it that they are no different. The Tantric practice was/is deep rooted in the centuries-old ritualistic tradition of India across Kashmir, Tibet, Bengal and Kerala with a lot of variations across the sub-continent. Some of the variations uses meat, fish, alcohol and sex in ritualistic practices. The Vedantic, on the other hand is more of a knowledge-based system, spiritual realisation is more of a mental exercise in this tradition. Kundalini yoga is deeply connected with the Tantric tradition, where a practitioner aims at awakening his spiritual energy that is entangled at the bottom of his/her spine like a small serpant. The metaphor of snake offers infinite opportunity for interpretations. On one hand, snake has been at the core of Hindu religion for ages. Snake also symbolises sex. In most Tantric traditions, sexual union of Shiva and Shakti epitomizes spiritual realisation. Guru, has certainly used this metaphor because of this mirage of abstract opportunities. That is characteristic of Guru’s poems. Look at the way he symbolises the trans-body orgasmic pleasure of spiritual awakening as a 1000-hooded serpant in one of the lines. In this poem, he also passively touches one of the extreme traditions of Tantric practice, the Aghora’s of Northern India by depicting Shiva who smears ashes from the cemetery all over his body. They are the ones who uses meat, alcohol and sex as part of their spiritual pursuit. Then he depicts another Tantric branch, that practises immense bodily discipline and celibacy as part of spiritual pursuit. In depicting them, he uses the celibate Shiva who flares all his sexual desires by opening the third eye. Guru, at the end of the poem, lands back in the Vedantic ideology that all that spiritual pursuit leads to the ‘self’ I am god! ‘Dance, dance Oh serpant! Dance and relentlessly seek, Oh serpant! Dance in the eternal bliss of the self’ Guru Nirmala Panicker’s choreography of Narayana Guru’s song, is indeed an abstract poem. I would place it at the highest pedestal of dance choreographies. It is abstract, that is what I like most about it. If some audience get lost, it Is probably due to the abstractness. But it leaves us open-ended for imaginations. Every time I watch this being danced, I imagine. It helps me interpret more and more of Guru’s poem. That is what visual art should do, in my opinion open the doors of imagination. After all, the 'rasa' that Natyashastra talks about should be evoked in the minds of the spectator! The other most important aspect of this choreography is that it connects these rather high-fundu philosophies to the people-folk. The Tantric and Vedantic texts, sit it high-class libraries and are used only for political purposes these days. They don’t have much to do with people, the real people who are spread across the realms of social hierarchy. Does anyone have this so-called spiritual awakening? Does anyone experience the pure bliss that Narayana Guru talks about? Yes! It is an emphatic yes! Have you seen the innumerable folklore art forms all over India? Unlike, the theory of spirituality living in Sanskrit text books and often resorted to by the rich and elite upper class who have enough money and time to go to the new-gen spirituality schools in the temples and suburbs, these art forms represent day-to-day emotions of common man, their pain, agony, sufferings and occasional happiness. Through such modes of expression, people do attain a state of spiritual bliss, even if it is momentary, before going back to the realities of day-to-day life. This choreography depicts this democratic world of spirituality all through-out the presentation. Towards the end, it enacts the state of transcendental consciousness that is attained by getting lost in music and dance in folk expressions like Sarappam Thullal. The music supported just by Veena, Maddalam, Idakka and Kurunkuzhal, ably used by creative musicians reproduces an environment of folklore music. Abhinaya Festival, Brisbane saw a beautiful presentation of the dance. The tough subject was safe in the hands of Sandra Pisharody, a wonderful dancer. Nirmala Paniker Sandra Pisharody