Mohiniyattam, a solo dance from Kerala, is usually summed up in a few soft adjectives. They say little about what the dancer does.
The movement
Start with the torso. Over a base of bent knees, the upper body sways from side to side and traces circles and half-circles. The feet move the dancer through stylized steps called charis, which carry her sideways, forward and back and change her speed. The dancer and researcher Nirmala Paniker counts fourteen of them. Kalamandalam Kalyanikutty Amma, the dancer most closely associated with codifying the form, sorted its basic movement units, the adavus, into four groups.
The music
Mohiniyattam is usually danced to Carnatic music, with song texts in Manipravalam, a blend of Malayalam and Sanskrit. A vocalist and mridangam are standard. The edakka, a Kerala drum, is common, and violin, veena or flute may join. The playwright Kavalam Narayana Panikkar later argued for Sopanam, Kerala’s own temple singing style, and for Kerala rhythms in place of Carnatic talas. The dancers Bharati Shivaji and Kanak Rele were important early collaborators in his work with Sopanam music. A recital today may draw on either stream, or both.
The repertoire
Kalyanikutty Amma set out a recital order that runs from cholkettu through jatiswaram, varnam, padam and tillana to slokam and saptam. The early sequence closely followed the Bharatanatyam recital (see Bharatanatyam: Rhythm, Gesture and Expression). Padams usually give the most room to abhinaya, the expressive interpretation of a text. Sopanam-based programs use other items, among them Ganapathi, Mukhachalam, Niram and Jeeva.
A history to read carefully
Accounts of the dance’s early history differ. It received significant patronage at the nineteenth-century court of Swathi Thirunal, ruler of Travancore, where Vadivelu of the Tanjore Quartet served as a court musician, and Swathi Thirunal’s compositions remain in the repertoire. By the early twentieth century the dance had lost standing. The poet Vallathol Narayana Menon founded Kerala Kalamandalam in 1930 and worked to bring Mohiniyattam into its teaching. Kalyanikutty Amma trained there and gave her debut performance in 1939.
At a recital, the singing usually signals which stream the program follows, Carnatic or Sopanam.
For short introductions to Mohiniyattam and other forms, see Meet the Art Forms.
Image: Methil Devika. CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons.
