CHENNAI: Ananda Shankar Jayant was so lost in dance that she hardly had the time to think about cancer. For the Andhra-based Bharathanatyam dancer, who was diagnosed with breast cancer in 2008, dance was what helped her fight the dreaded disease. “It (dance) saw me through one of the biggest challenges in my life,” she says. Having recovered by 2010, Ananda affirms that she is perfectly fine now. The dancer, who runs her dance school, Shankarananda Kalakshetra in Hyderabad, will present her ‘Shringara Darpanam’ today at Kalakshetra, as part of the ‘Remembering Rukmini Devi festival’ (Rukmini is the founder of Kalakshetra). Ananda’s association with Kalakshetra began when she was invited on a scholarship, as an eleven-year-old. How does it feel for her to go back to perform at her Alma Mater? “Nervous!” she laughs and adds, “I am excited to be coming back because that is the stage where I started performing as a young dancer.” She remembers calling Rukmini Devi athai affectionately and says, “The most important thing about her is that she found in each one of us a hidden talent that we ourselves didn’t know about and she nourished and cherished that.” She adds, “From learning with her, what I have realised is that art cannot be a career or performance, it has to go beyond that and it has to become you.”The opening act of the five-day solo festival, Ananda’s hour-long mono act will bring together some of the rare Annamacharya's krithis which will be performed in an ekaharya format. She explains, “In this format, the entire theme runs non-stop and is continuous. One person takes on many roles.” Providing a background on Annamacharya's krithis, Ananda explains, “Annamacharya, who lived in the 13th Century, is said to have composed 32,000 songs. They were all etched on copper plates, but were lost. In 1922, 12,000 of those songs were found inside the Tirumala temple.” The songs didn’t have notations and there was no clear indication as to how they were to be sung, but the ragas of each one of them were listed. “Since then, many famous musicians have set tunes to 1,500 songs out of those. My musician, Satthiraju Venu Madhav, composed music for 108 of them. And from that, I have culled out the 'Taala Patra – Hymns from the Hills’ segment to choreograph,” she says. Ananda has strung together the ‘Taala Patra’ with some of Annamacharya’s Shringaras, which are supposed to be extremely romantic. “It will be in the format of a storyline, similar to the Kesha Govindam,” says Ananda. Ananda’s programme, Shringara Darpanam, an ekaharya, is scheduled for this evening at 6 pm at Rukmini Arangham, Kalakshetra Foundation, Tiruvanmiyur, Chennai.
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