I spent my Friday evening enjoying a performance of Indian classical dance and music, put on by the student organization Michigan Sahana. I’ve been to two of their shows before, and was impressed with the quality of each segment, whether it was a dance or a musical performance. Learning Indian classical dance or music is like learning ballet: you begin young, and it takes years to learn the techniques and complexities of the art. It’s awe-inspiring, then, that each of the students who perform in these shows maintains such a passion for their particular art, and that by doing so they are keeping traditional Indian performance arts alive.

So, the Tulanā show. There were eight performances, three instrumental and five dances. Emphasizing tulanā, which in Hindi means ‘contrast’ or ‘comparison,’ was the theme of the show, and each performance endeavored to do this in its own way. In their programme, they wrote, “Tonight’s presentation will feature eight creative pieces carefully crafted to depict three different elements of contrast: variations in ragam, the musical scale; nritta versus nritya, the balance between technical dance and the portrayal of mood through facial expression, hand gestures, and body movements; and the distinction between different characters portrayed in a story.” The audience was also given further information about each performance before it began, which also helped to accentuate each one’s relation to the overall theme.

The three musical performances demonstrated the differences between the two styles of Indian classical music: Carnatic (from South India) and Hindustani (from North India). The first musical number, sung in the Carnatic style, was an arrangement of 41 first lines of different songs, each in a different key. The second song, although performed in the Hindustani style, also played upon the use of different musical scales: the two singers each sang in a different scale (A and D). I was surprised to find that they used a pentatonic (5-note) scale instead of a 7-note scale (analogous to the Western do-re-mi), but both are used in Indian music. Playing with this contrast between Carnatic and Hindustani music, the final musical number was a fusion of both styles, and was also entirely improvised (an element far more common in Indian classical than Western classical music). Two of the four instrumentalists played a Carnatic-style instrument, while the other two played Hindustani-style instruments. Basing their improvisation upon a single melodic line, they set up a call-and-response style of performing, where one musician would interpret this line in his own way, and then stop to allow the other musician to do the same. This was an excellent way of underlining the differences between the two styles of performing and improvising.

Using the same theme of contrast, the dance performances endeavored to use both technical elements of the dances as well as the conveying of concepts or emotions through hand gestures and facial expressions. There were three different types of classical dance performed: bharatanatyam, kuchipudi, and kathak. They are similar in that they all incorporate elaborate, brightly colored costumes that are often unrelated to the subject matter of the dance, little to no stage set, very specific hand gestures (each of which symbolizes something different), and in that each tells a story. On the other hand, the gestures and movements are different for each dance: for example, bharatanatyam relies far more heavily on the stamping of the feet as a fundamental step in the movements. An intriguing note is that out of the five dances, only one was choreographed by the performers themselves, which is different from most modern dances. However, all the dances beautifully juxtaposed the technical footwork with the expressive imagery: in some of the dances, the music faded once or twice into just a continued rhythm, allowing the dancers to showcase their considerable skill before delving back into the story.

Within these stories, the dances focused on contrasting the different characters: one, for example, contrasted two incarnations of a Hindu god, while another portrayed the relationship between god and devotee. The final dance did an exemplary job of uniting the elements it used to show contrast, simply through the subject material: it was a dance about Ardhanareeshwara, a Hindu god who is half male and half female. The two dancers used different motions and gestures to describe the personality of each half, and ended the dance standing one in front of the other, representing the united form of the god. This final unification related to the overall show itself, implying that in the end, Indian performance arts, highly diverse though they are, still retain the same essence.