Sahitya’s Adavu Jamming, A Hit With Young Dancers

Dance Guru Pasumarthy Ramalinga Sastry’s student, Sahitya Ramkumar, under the banner of Sahityakalpa organised an Adavu jamming session, the first of its kind, in Hyderabad, which was a hit among young dancers, who joined in to explore the Adavus, at Phoenix arena, Hitech City, recently. Speaking exclusively to Natyahasini, Sahitya Ramkumar shares that Adavu Jamming session held on 19 June 2022 was more than a workshop meant to be a dancers get together… after observing events in other cities for dancers. “I really wanted to create a starting point for the Hyderabad dancer community…. The activities were designed toward getting to know each other more and at the same time dance together,” says the young dancer. 

The Sahityakalpa founder says it was an unexpected response to the session. “The dancers put in a friendly effort to spread the word before and after the event. An endearing bunch of 18 dancers, all disciples of Hyderabad-based esteemed Gurus, including Padma Shri Ananda Shankar Jayant, Pasumarthy Ramalinga Sastry, late Shobha Naidu, Dr. Rajeswari Sainath, Smitha Madhav, to name a few were present,” she says.

Going into the depth of the session, Sahitya states that a series of activities were taken up in a flow. “Jamming and busking were replicated in the context of Indian dance forms beginning with a warm-up to push up the adrenaline rush, dancers created their own rhythm and movement. Dancers went through multiple moments of absolute extempore creation and there was ample opportunity of exploring the magic of Manodharma that exists in Bharatanatyam and Kuchipudi,” the young dancer says. She further says that most of the evening was spent dancing in a circle so that dancers could look at each other, smile more and make the movement energy contagious. She confesses that all the activities were designed to learn more about their co-dancers in a jolly and exciting manner.

Main Intention: The disciple of Pasumarthy Ramalinga Sastry says that the main intention was not only to explore the synergy that lies in dancing together but also to meet co-dancers in the city and build a strong and vibrant community that gets to know each other in order to develop ideas to collaborate in the days to come. Deciphering Neo Adavus, Sahitya says: “It was mainly to do with creating new patterns over the existing adavus with team mates. Each team was given an adavu, based on the chit they picked up and were encouraged to create three new versions within a short span of time.” The dancer agrees that there is certain energy in dancing together and the most basic yet challenging piece is the alarippu. “It was an exhilarating three-minute of dancing the alarippu together,” she states. 

The dancer adds that in addition, opportunities were created for important dance industry related discussions that would stimulate problem solving for the future. “Pertinent practical questions of logistics were discussed,” says Sahitya. Revealing the reaction of the participants, Sahitya says it was very heart-warming to see the number of dancers who shared their experience on social media and through all the personal messages. “Most of them are looking forward to having more such events soon again,” she says on a promising note. 

Art connoisseur and founder of Natyaswara, Anna Rao, presided over the event and supported the young artists in their new experiments. In his brief address, he had a word of praise for Sahitya Ramkumar for planning and executing an event like this.