An eight-day online Indian classical dance festival, organised as tribute to the late Kapila Vatsyayan, a scholar of Indian classical dance and art who passed away recently, is set to begin on Tuesday.
Culture Minister A.K. Balan will inaugurate the programme being jointly organised by the Culture Department, Bharat Bhavan, and State Youth Commission.
Bharat Bhavan member secretary and festival director Pramod Payyannur, Youth Commission chairperson Chintha Jerome, Malayalam Mission director Suja Susan George, and Director of Culture Sadasivan Nair T.R. will speak on the occasion.
The inaugural performance will feature Bharatanatyam exponent Narthaki Nataraj, the first transgender recipient of Padma Shri. It will be followed by performances by R.L.V. Ramakrishnan (Mohiniyattam), Shijith Nambiar and Parvathy Menon (Bharatanatyam), and Aishwarya Warrier (Mohiniyattam).
Tribute session
The separate session will be held to commemorate Kapila Vatsyayan in which noted personalities, including the famed dancer couple V.P. Dhananjayan and Shanta Dhananjayan, Padma Subrahmanyam, dance historian and scholar Sunil Kothari, dance critic Tapati Chowdhurie, playwright Omchery N.N. Pillai, and Communist Party of India (Marxist) Polit Bureau member M.A. Baby will reminisce about the ‘grand matriarch of cultural research’.
The dance festival, which will be streamed live on the Facebook page of Bharat Bhavan from 7 p.m. to 9 p.m. on all days, will feature 80 exponents of various classical dance forms, including Bharatanatyam, Kathak, Odissi, Kuchipudi, Mohiniyattam, Manipuri, Kathakali, Rabindra Nritham, Vilasini Natyam, and Chhau Nritham.
