ABSTRACT
The instrumental power of adavu lies in the use of conscious repetition to gradually reorder a performer’s movement preferences and material substance. The perspicacity and sophistication needed to realize the ideal form and flow of each adavu grows steadily, year by year, through sustained practice. The geometrical and rhythmical perfection adavu seek to realize is a challenge that seems ever just beyond the author capacity; his moment of their mastery is an ever-receding point. Consistent practice of adavu makes a transfixing thread passing through the variables of days and seasons and years. To drill in adavu and to dance abstract sequences like allarippu is to gradually map connections between one’s very body parts and grand cosmological propositions about time and space. Bharatanatyam training invites the dancer to surrender to concepts of time-without-end pervading the Hindu cultural continuum the dance ordinarily occupies.
