ABSTRACT
The stage lights come up gradually as a bharatanatyam dancer, costumed in a tailored silk sari and beautifully adorned in jewelry, walks out from backstage. In a manner neither formal nor completely relaxed, she walks downstage to a point beyond the normal performing space but still removed from the audience. She begins to explain the key features of this South Indian classical dance form. More specifically, she extracts, for decoding, the symbolic hand gestures known as mudras from bharatanatyam’s semiotic lexicon. Standing in one place and without musical accompaniment, she performs mudras fluidly and gracefully. Meanwhile, she also translates into English the sahitya, or lyrics, of the song that the gestures will accompany. Demonstrating her skill in elegantly balancing the competing tasks of speaking and rendering gestural movement, she alerts the audience to the linguistic nature of the abhinaya, or dramatic dance. 1
