How to harness rhythm - the remaining strategies

Note: This is building on my last post, so I’d recommend that you start with part 1 if you haven’t already read it.

We started last week with how there are three major strategies dancers use to get better control of rhythm - (1) the metronome, (2) practicing putting talam, and (3) identifying “banda gurtus” (mildly, cues) correlating the song with the rhythmic structure, and we dove into the first strategy - how to use the metronome. In this post, I went to spend some time discussing how the second and third strategies work, and how to make the most of them, with a strong foundation.

As we move from steps to jatis and items, we are trained to think in terms of phrases of movements and phrases of sahityam. Logically, it makes sense. Combinations of steps and hand gestures lead to jatis and variations within items. Thinking in terms of phrases allows us to understand the punctuation and flow of the choreography, such as where fluidity is needed or sharp demarcation is more suitable.

Some of my earlier dance education was at Kuchipudi Kalakshetra in Vizag (now Kuchipudi Art Academy - Visakhapatnam), and as I was still learning my fundamentals but staying in class until my mom and all the other senior students were done with their class, I got to sit and watch. Well, sit and watch the senior classes and sing along. And, put talam while I was singing, of course. When getting through rhythmically complex passages, I’d try and keep up until I lost the grip of my talam, and then pick back up and the start of the next variation bashfully, vowing to practice until I could get through the tougher segments. Once we moved to the US, as I graduated to items, my fervent interest in being able to put talam to the songs and jatis did not diminish, but again, it was a lot of bullheaded practice. But, through practice came understanding.

I began to notice how the (obviously steady) heart beat of the talam spliced the logical movement based phrases, and how the movement based phrases danced all around the heartbeat through gaps, cross rhythms, and syncopation before the two neatly converged at the end (though, I promise you, I did not have the language to describe all of this). The most exciting jatis were those where I had to wait until the end for that resolution (the chaturasram part of the final Sivashtakam jati comes to mind).

Now, I share these anecdotes because not just to create a sentimental narrative, but because I have no doubt these experiences must be pretty widespread, if not damn near universal. Think back to your own variants of these experiences as we dive into this strategy. The examples I’m picking are from Mastergaru’s choreographies, since they are widely known and also the pieces I’m most familiar with.

The basic version of the second strategy is to steadily put talam and try and say a jathi to talam. The goal when we do this is for the talam and jati to neatly converge at the end. However, you should break that larger goal into smaller steps. Pick out each phrase or movement segment and see where in the talam it starts and ends. Simpler jatis like the first 3 or 4 that we learn in the first half jathis for Kuchipudi typically have phrases that start in samam, evenly at the top of the talam, and end in the middle or end of the tala. However, that’s the exception, not the norm. I mean, take the ending for each of these very jathis, and you’ll find the exceptions.

In addition to the start and end of the phrases in relation to the talam, note the location and length of the gaps. This is critical. When we are dancing, we rarely focus on the gaps as distinct units and instead, include them as punctuation for the units of movement. This is where we can get into trouble. I’ve seen many people take a jati, put talam as they say it, and if it doesn’t match up at the end, just start over at the beginning and try again. In fact, this is also how I initially started. And, this is where we risk slipping into adjustments and errors. If we instead take a very systematic approach of understanding how each segment of the jati fits into the tala line-by-line, we can more precisely isolate where the error might be.

Now, when I initially began learning to put talam for the first half jathis through recitation (and lots of trial and error), I would use tricks (“take a breath here” or “snap a finger here”) to fall into the right rhythm, but this was not a very precise method. This changed rapidly when I switched to notating jatis. I cannot really notate “taka snap! diki snap! jhanu gasp! ta di gi na tom” even if that was how I was making the jati come to tala.

This occurred around the same time that I start spending Tuesdays rushing from school to orchestra rehearsals, where we would all collectively count to the conductor’s yells, and I learned the term “subdividing”. The 8 beats of the the tala for my dance class songs were subdividing exactly like my violin sheet music. So, if my sheet music had a notation for notes and rests, why not my jatis? I dove headfirst into this exercise, drawing from my grandfather’s long hand music class notes and a vague idea of aksharas and commas, to notate the jathis I was orally learning and practicing to recite talam in dance class. (My notation scheme has evolved greatly since those early days. I address notation with a bit more detail in a couple of my older pieces on tala here and here. For the specific fragment from earlier, notating the gaps would result in taka , diki , jhanu ; tadiginatom, where the ‘,’ indicates one akshara gap and the ‘;’ indicates two aksharas.)

Another area where this becomes very important is any place where you’re counting footwork. I was once told “Memorize these numbers - 5-8, 4-7, 4-7, 3-5. If you get lost, listen to the nattuvangam on the recording for the ending.” (Pop quiz! Which item are we talking about?) My mom showed our class why those numbers are what they are, and why each of those are paired with the specific associated theermanams by simply saying the bols for the footwork while putting tala. It clicked! So this became an exercise whenever I came across complex cross-rhythms. I recommend you do it too. You’ll practice with understanding, and it won’t be blind memorization. You also won’t lose your talam balance because you’re panicking or feeling lost.

One exercise I practiced extensively is putting talam to the following rhythmic pattern, which comes in many choreographies, including Mastergaru’s Vasanta jatiswaram (or, more accurately, a swarajati choreographed as a jatiswaram?) and Natesa Koutvam, where you do two each of 4, 3, 5, 7, and 9, followed by theermanam. The pattern goes as follows:

taka dhimi taka jhanu takita takita takatakita takatakita takadhimitakita takajhanutakita takadhimitakatakita takajhanutakatakita tarikita tom, tarikita tom, tarikita tom.

When you overlap the talam, you’ll see it slicing away at the “phrases” the way we recognize them as soon as we go into the odd-numbered ones:

taka dhimi / taka jhanu / takita ta / kita taka | takita ta / katakita | takadhimi / takita ta || kajhanuta / kita taka / dhimi taka / takita ta | ka jha nu ta / ka takita | tarikita tom, / ; tarikita | tom, ; / tari kita tom , ||

Once I could say that segment while steadily putting tala, the next challenge became to sing the regular song while either dancing the footwork or hitting the footwork on the stick. (To level up from there, put talam on one hand, and either do the footwork or hit the footwork pattern using the stick while singing the song lyrics.)

As you do this, you’ll start noticing how the syllables of the specific song you’re doing intersect with the syllables of the rhythmic pattern. This leads into the third strategy - cues based on the sahityam. This is a strategy I’ve seen very often both taught explicitly by teachers and subconsciously picked up by students, especially when there are features such as eduru (off the beat) or speed/footwork changing coming into play.

One way that might be seen is aligning the rhythmic pattern to the words. Taking the verse ‘Koluvaina ninu chooda kalavaa kannulu veyyi’, someone might say you switch from takadhimi to takita at the word “kalavaa” (Mastergaru’s Koluvaitiva Ranga Sayi). Or, they might be heavily stressing the syllables of the verse ‘ninditendu mukha bimba kalaadhari’ for the variation where we’re walking off the beat and ending with a tai diditai (Mastergaru’s Brindavana Nilaye Radhe). This can be a very helpful tool when first learning a new piece, until the difficult passages become innate to the body. I also heavily revisited this strategy during my research to make sense of why a choregrapher may have chosen a particular rhythmic pattern to overlay with a given set of lyrics, why it made aesthetic sense for the bhava being presented (more to come on that in a future post). However, if this strategy is not grounded in a very specific understanding of the interrelationship between rhythm, tala, and sahityam in any specific context, it serves only as a crutch.

That covers what I have to say about the three strategies. I want to shift from the next post on into why this is important. I think we tend to approach rhythm and emotion as two separate, unrelated spheres, which is a very artificial divide - especially for Kuchipudi! There is a fine balance between being focused on the technique of execution, which primarily focuses on the physicality of dance and technical prowess, and the emotional, spiritual, philosophical side of dance, which calls on us to “learn the techniques, and then forget about them,” as was aptly said during a discussion between Lalitha SIndhuri and Santosh G. Nair that was streamed live on Instagram today. However, as the undercurrent of that conversation showed, and as I found again and again through my own dance journey, there is an intrinsic relationship between the two aspects, and I would argue that rhythm is the vehicle through which that relationship manifests.

Rhythm is beautiful as an instrument of nritta, as we are seeing and enjoying with the many jatis (and associated challenges) are being shared online during the current global crisis. But at the end of the day, nritta is just one aspect of the spectrum that makes up Indian classical dance, while rhythm permeates all of dance. I’d like to delve into that in my next few posts, looking at what the treatises have said on the subject, what academia has found, and then looking at how it manifests within Kuchipudi. Also, I’ll try and put together a video demonstrating each of the strategies and examples I’ve covered in this post and the last one soon.

PC: Thank you to Peri Subramnian from the ICAPS Committee for the photo! This was from January’s lecture-demo.