Kuchipudi Dance

I recently had the opportunity to photograph the very talented Arunima Kumar performing her craft, the Indian dance of Kuchipudi. The dance is focused on expression of emotions and has evolved from India’s equivalent of musical theatre, IE from story telling and acting mixed in with music.

How the artform has transformed since its formative stages is a fascinating story in itself. But lest I make this a wordy blog post, I’ll just say that photographing this dance is very much about capturing the meaning in each movement. Those moments are important and each describes a specific theme or part of a story. Kuchipudi is expressive, more so than many other forms of dance I have seen.

Arunima was kind enough to provide a little bit of background to what each pose represents. These descriptions are included in the captions below each photo.

I think its important to know that each truly skilled Kuchipudi dancer brings their own style to the art form. The hand movements, gestures and face movements are refined over years of practice and eventually become a quasi reflection of the performers own viewpoint on life mixed in with the artistic background and education. In that way, it isn’t dissimilar to photography, which I feel is likely influenced by the photographer’s own view of the world and other people. Subtle differences in hand movements can offer great insight into the performers style.

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