Here Are Some Good Sources on Bharatanatyam

1. There actually is a WordPress bharatanatyam blog!  It gives some good history, including more detailed descriptions of things that I related in bits and pieces earlier.  The blog does seem kind of new and not really fully formed yet. I hope to see more here in the future.

2, There is a list of 1000 public ratings of Bharata Natyam dancers!  If anybody needs more names of dancers to look for, I guess this is the place to go.  People who only know the filmi dancing (among whom I counted myself until a very short time ago) should still recognize a couple of names here.  I noticed Vyjayanthimala at number 5 (which I assume would mean the contemporary 70-something Vyjayanthimala, or else she’d be number #1?) and Shobana Chandrakumar at about number 9.  I wouldn’t take the rankings too seriously – probably they’re deliberately underrating the dancers who are famous in films.  (That’s what I think, but what do I know?)  It’s still a very informative list.

3.  YouTube itself.  There are tons of bharatanatyam clips.  I’ve been looking at a lot of them during the past week, when I haven’t had any movies queued up and didn’t want to get to other things, as a “time pass.”  I also find these dance clips can cheer me up or soothe me.  (And it’s been a pretty hard week – don’t ask; you don’t want to read about it all here!)

So now I know about a bunch of contemporary bharatanatyam dancers who’ve never been in films.

One nice YouTube source is the classical Indian dance enthusiast Minaiminai.  I’ve already borrowed from her site a few times to post Shobana clips.  Here’s another bharatanatyam dancer she posted whom I enjoyed watching, Apoorva Jayaraman:

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P.S. (8/27):  More sources found:  Bharatanatyam and the World Wide Web, Bharat Natyam, Life is not Bollywood…

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