Dance and philosophy inform each other. Centuries of dances in India are a perfect example. Dr. Binita Mehta (senior lecturer in philosophy) recently contributed a chapter to The Bloomsbury Handbook of Dance and Philosophy about Bharatanatyam, a classical dance of southern India that traces its origins back to ancient times.
In the chapter, “Indian Traditional Dance and the Experience of Ego-Transcendence,” Mehta describes how the traditional dance conveys emotions and mythology. “This dance employs a complex set of bodily gestures to convey ideas and emotions. The dance represents the stories of gods and heroes and enacts manifestation of divine powers and natural phenomena.”
Mehta describes how the dance helps the dancers and audience achieve rasa, or aesthetic delight that is known and appreciated through experience. “Rasa is not a mere cognition of the fact that the dancer is portraying a particular mood…[T]he emotion becomes a spectator’s own immediate experience.”
However, enjoyment of the dance comes when the audience appreciates the dance in a selfless way. The audience focuses on the dance instead of how the dance reminds them of the pain, love, and grief in their own lives. “In a powerful rasa experience, there is a transcendence of the ego consciousness or the sense of ‘I’ and ‘mine.'”
Hand gestures are important in Bharatanatyam. Some require both hands, others require one, but all convey great meaning. “The principle of hand-gesture is presumably derived through close observation of nature.” The hand gestures represent humans taking a full part in nature and the world around them. “A human being is an active participant in the natural world rather than simply an onlooker.”
Although Bharatanatyam is an ancient dance form, it resonates today because it encourages reflection on universal parts of the human experience. “Though the content of the dance generally does not explicitly deal with current social issues, it…relates to social dimensions…[S]elf transformation is seen as the foundation of constructive social change.