Kuchipudi takes its name from a village in the Krishna district of Andhra Pradesh. It began as theater, with plays in Telugu that combined dance, song and acting. Much of its stage repertoire, including solo items drawn from the dance-dramas, comes from that history.
A village of performers
According to tradition, the poet Siddhendra Yogi, whose dates are debated, composed the dance-drama Bhama Kalapam and trained young Brahmin men of the village to perform it. The performers became known as Bhagavatulu. The story survives in several versions, and there is evidence of dance in the region well before his time. Bhama Kalapam follows Satyabhama, Krishna’s proud wife, through jealousy and separation over the parijata flower. Men played every role, and accounts of the tradition praise their portrayals of women. Characters typically entered with a song of introduction, the pravesa daruvu. A historically related Telugu-language dance-drama tradition, Bhagavata Mela, is still practiced in parts of Tamil Nadu.
From the play to the solo recital
In the first half of the twentieth century, Vedantam Lakshminarayana Sastry (1886–1956) developed solo dancing and began teaching women. Solo recitals came to follow a sequence of invocation, pure dance, narrative and expressive pieces. Excerpts from the dance-dramas, such as Satyabhama’s entrance, became solo showpieces.
The tarangam, a common closing item, sets verses from Narayana Teertha’s Krishna Leela Tarangini. The dancer often performs on the rim of a brass plate, sometimes with a water pot balanced on the head.
The contemporary stage
Vempati Chinna Satyam founded the Kuchipudi Art Academy in Madras in 1963. Over the following decades he choreographed more than fifteen dance-dramas for city audiences, among them Padmavati Srinivasa Kalyanam and Hara Vilasam. He also created a large body of solo items, revised costume and music, and set out a structured course of training. His style is now widely taught, but it is one of several lineages, and dance-drama is still performed alongside solo work.
The scholar Rumya Putcha has examined how classical Kuchipudi came to rest on a history of Brahmin male performers while its modern stage centered on women dancers.
Watch for a character’s entrance, often marked by its own song, a habit inherited from the dance-dramas. AFA has included Kuchipudi in mixed programs, among them the 2008 Festival of Classical Dances from India. Details are in the Archive.
For short introductions to Kuchipudi and related forms, see Meet the Art Forms and Bharatanatyam: Rhythm, Gesture and Expression.
Image: A Kuchipudi dancer, 2017. Photo: Nmvs, CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons.
