Kathak is the classical dance most closely tied to Hindustani music, and a performance moves between two kinds of attention. In one, the dancer’s feet and the drummer exchange rhythmic ideas. In the other, a single dancer may tell a story, playing every character.
Saying it, then dancing it
Kathak dancers often recite a composition’s syllables, its bols, before dancing them. This recitation, called padhant, lets you hear the shape of a passage before you see it. The dancer and teacher Janaki Patrik describes the recited bols as an unwritten notation shared by dancers and tabla players, allowing them to perform together without rehearsal.
Footwork, called tatkar, is danced flat-footed, and the ankle bells make it audible. Behind it, a short melodic refrain called the lehra or nagma repeats once per cycle of the tala. Percussion comes from tabla or pakhawaj. Passages often end with a tihai, a phrase repeated three times so that it lands on sam, the first beat of the cycle. Fast spins, or chakkars, are among the form’s most recognizable features.
Improvisation as exchange
Patrik argues that upaj, improvisation, rests on practiced techniques. One is sawal-jawab, question and answer: dancer and drummer trade phrases that grow shorter until both arrive together on sam.
One dancer, many characters
In gat bhav, the dancer tells a story over a steady tala and melody, using gait, gesture and expression rather than song. Other pieces interpret sung texts, such as a thumri or bhajan. Birju Maharaj spoke of using the two sides of his body for two characters, Krishna on one side and Radha on the other.
Lineages and history
Three gharanas, or lineages, are most often named. Lucknow, associated with the nineteenth-century court of Wajid Ali Shah, is traditionally associated with abhinaya and grace. Jaipur is associated with rhythmic virtuosity and compositions drawn from the pakhawaj. Banaras, traced to Janakiprasad, uses its own dance syllables, called natwari bols. The differences are largely matters of emphasis, and styles overlap.
Kathak’s name comes from katha, story, and it is often traced to ancient storytellers. The ethnomusicologist Margaret Walker argues instead that the dance known today took shape in courts, salons and twentieth-century reform, and that the name is first attested for a dance only in the 1930s.
In performance, listen for the recitation, and for the moment the dancer stops keeping time and starts telling a story.
For more on Kathak and other forms, see Meet the Art Forms. For rhythmic cycles, see Tala: Hearing Time in Cycles.
Image: Kathak footwork (tatkar), 2015. Photo: RaniJhansi0310, CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons.
