Worldwide Yoga Day: Odissi exponent Surupa Sen on how dance and yoga nourish the physique and the thoughts

Surupa Sen
| Picture Credit score: Karthik Venkatraman

“Run! Run quicker and you’re going to get there faster!”, is all we hear and do in our lives. We’re always surrounded by the demand to manage regardless of how. On the opposite finish of the spectrum, our historic practices train us to be nonetheless.

Yoga and classical dance are each indigenous traditions of India that search the identical aim — to concentrate on the breath and let the praana information each motion. To interact each the physique and the thoughts to behave directly for a holistic expertise. The traditional practices counsel that we pause to have interaction deeply with life, and compassionately with ourselves.

Yoga allows the mind-body steadiness that assist us make higher selections for residing.

Dancers are advanced motion artistes. They should be contortionists, martial artists, poets, story tellers and sculptors all of sudden. They don’t simply deliver an concept to life after they dance however create life itself in every second. As a dancer, my physique adjustments each second to stick to a complexly shifting thoughts. From the slightest quiver of a lip and the fleeting angle of the attention to the mild tremble of a finger, all come collectively to specific a single nuanced emotion.

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For dancers, physique is a residing instrument
| Picture Credit score:
Karthik Venkatraman

For a dancer, the physique is a residing instrument. If my physique should go to locations that my thoughts seeks in its creativeness, I need to prepare to stretch its potential in order that I’ll inhabit these boundless worlds. Thus when the physique, thoughts and spirit come collectively, we now have reached our aim.

Martha Graham, the good up to date dancer and choreographer stated, “I’m a dancer. I imagine we be taught by follow. Whether or not it means to be taught dance by practising dancing or to be taught to dwell by practising residing”.

Within the pursuit of excellence, for the previous 35 years that I’ve lived the lifetime of a dancer at Nrityagram, yoga and other forms of cross-training has been built-in into our every day schedule. For years now, we now have studied and developed physique kinetics that mix completely different views of coaching to particularly nourish and inform the Odissi physique. In my preliminary years as a pupil, I discovered a lacuna within the software of yoga follow to the strains of alignment inside which the Odissi dancer should operate. Most practitioners of yoga will not be dancers or essentially perceive the forces appearing on a dancer’s physique. I felt this to be the central cause for the accidents I confronted as a dancer. I due to this fact tried to know by myself by analysis and research methods to heal myself and to make sure that none who educated with me would undergo the identical injury. Selecting selectively from completely different types of physique work, we created a curriculum that may improve our potential as performers.

Dancers throughout yoga periods at Nrityagram.
| Picture Credit score:
Courtesy: Nrityagram

At Nrityagram, the dancers start their day with a stroll or run, then clear the gurukul areas, adopted by physique conditioning workouts. Every day is a special mannequin that should reply to the physique’s want for that individual day. So as to do this, the dancers should first put together their thoughts in order that it assimilates the physique’s wants guaranteeing the proper selection of workouts to higher their follow for that day. Every bone and muscle have to be oxygenated and lubricated to sufficiently ship on the highest degree. As soon as this preparation is full, an extra warm-up is finished in school earlier than the rigour of advanced dance vocabulary is undertaken. After many hours on the dance ground, we permit the physique time to de-stress with stretches which are suited to every dancer to get better as rapidly as attainable.

Nrityagram has been on the very forefront of building the concept that the longevity of a dance profession is dependent upon the satisfactory safety and respect we should give to and have for our our bodies. Each choreographically and as performers, we now have pushed our skills to render new dimensions of talent within the classical dance world. This, in flip, has impressed artistes to discover new and extra environment friendly methods of working each in Odissi and different dance types.

Yoga and dance collectively may also help obtain each yogic stillness and a versatile physique.
| Picture Credit score:
Courtesy: Nrityagram

Dance traditions in India have been handed down by generations of artistes. As we gaze on the dancing figures on temple partitions, we search what they’ve — each yogic stillness and versatile physique. Yoga and dance collectively may also help us obtain this.

Although AI and bots have entered the human area and threaten to do all that we will, it can’t for now categorical what the dancer’s physique can. Till then, allow us to proceed to nourish this extraordinary instrument referred to as the human physique by yoga and dance.