Surupa Sen | Photo Credit: Karthik Venkatman
“Run! Run away fast and you will be there soon!”, We all hear and do in our life. We are constantly surrounded by the demand to face any way. At the other end of the spectrum, our ancient practices still teach us.
Both yoga and classical dance are indigenous traditions of India who seek the same goal – to be aware of the breath and let’s go Prana Guide every action. To attach both body and mind to work at once for a overall experience. Ancient practices suggest that we stop to engage deeply with life, and have pity with ourselves.
Yoga enables mind-body balance that helps us make a better option to live.
The dancer is a complex movement artist. They should have contraceptives, martial artists, poets, story teller and sculptor at a time at a time. They do not bring an idea only to life when they dance but make life themselves at every moment. As a dancer, my body changes every moment to complicate shifting brain. All come together to express the same fine feeling, until the soft tremors of a finger from a lip and fleeting angle of the eye.
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For dancers, the body is a living means. Photo Credit: Karthik Venkatman
For a dancer, the body is a living means. If my body should go to the places that my mind wants in its imagination, then I should train to increase its ability so that I can live in those infinite world. Thus when the body, mind and soul come together, we have reached our goals.
The great contemporary dancer and choreographer Martha Graham said, “I am a dancer. I believe we learn from practice. Does it mean to practice dance by practicing dance or learn to practice life”.
In the discovery of excellence, for the last 35 years, which I have lived the life of a dancer in nritagram, yoga and other types of cross-training, have been integrated into our daily program. Now for years, we have studied and developed body canteix that especially add different approaches to the Odissi body to inform the body. In my early years as a student, I found a lacuna in the application of yoga practice, in which the Odissi dancer should act on the lines of alignment. Most of the doctors of yoga may not be a dancer or necessarily understand the forces working on a dancer’s body. I felt that this is the central cause of injuries faced as a dancer. So I tried to fix myself through research and study methods and ensure that anyone who is not trained with me would face the same loss. Choosing selectively from various forms of body work, we created a course that would increase our ability as artists.
The dancer during the yoga session at Nrityagram. , Photo Credit: Courtesy: Nrityagram
In nrityagram, the dancers start their day with a walk or run, then clean the gurukul spaces, followed by body conditioning practice. Each day is a separate model that should respond to the need of the body for that particular day. To do this, the dancers must first prepare their brain to assimilate the needs of the body to ensure the right choice of exercise to improve their practice for the day. Each bone and muscles should be rich in oxygen and lubricate to distribute adequately at the highest level. Once this preparation is completed, another warm-up is done in the classroom before the hardness of complex dance terminology. After several hours on the dance floor, we allow the body to de-stress with stretch that are suited to recover as soon as possible for each dancer.
Nrityagram has been at the forefront of establishing the idea that a dance career’s longevity depends on adequate protection and respect that we should give to our body. As choreographer and artists, we have pushed our abilities to present new dimensions of skills in the world of classical dances. This, in turn, has inspired the artists to detect new and more efficient ways to work in Odissi and other dance styles.
Yoga and dance together can help achieve both yogic peace and a flexible body. , Photo Credit: Courtesy: Nrityagram
Dance traditions in India have been handed over through generations of artists. As we gaze at the figures of dance on the walls of the temple, we want what they have – both yogic peace and flexible body. Yoga and dance can help us achieve it together.
Although AI and Bots have entered human space and threatened to do whatever we can do, it can no longer express what the dancer’s body can do. Till then, we continue to nourish this extraordinary tool called human body through yoga and dance.
Published – June 19, 2025 06:21 pm IST
