Woodbury Teens To Perform Milestone Indian Classical Dance

WOODBURY, MN — This month two high school students from Woodbury will perform their Bharatanatyam Arangetram, a classical dance from South India.

Arjun Acharya, in 11th grade at Stillwater Area High School, will perform his Bharatanatyam Arangetram Saturday, Sept. 18 at East Ridge High School.

Maya Athena Ballolla, in 11th grade at Great River School, will perform her Bharatanatyam Arangetram Saturday, Sept. 25 at East Ridge High School.

Both performances will feature live music from Indian musicians.

These 2.5 hour performances are a major milestone for a dancer, and the performance will mark the first time the students are presented as qualified artists by their teacher, Suchitra Sairam, founder and director of Kala Vandanam Dance Company, for the first time, Sairam said.

The two students must each perform all of the fundamental aspects of the dance in a suite of 8-10 dances, Sairam said. The performance will allow Acharya and Athena Ballolla to publicly demonstrate their high levels of competence in the art form, and is also considered to be a launching point for the young artists, Sairam said.

Both young dancers shared with Patch that they became interested in dance because of their family members.

"My sister had been dancing for a couple of years and I used to just watch her," Acharya said. "And then at some point she'd be dancing in front of me, and I'd be doing a mirror image of what she was doing."

Athena Ballolla shared that her mother is a dancer and that she would watch her mom dance when she was younger.

Both students have been immersed in dance for a large portion of their lives. Acharya told Patch he has been dancing for eight years, and Athena Ballolla said she has been dancing for 12.

Athena Ballolla told Patch about what she finds most rewarding about dancing.

"I think the most rewarding thing is the freedom of creativity," she said. "Even though there's a structure to it, it's still very freeing."

Acharya said that he sees learning Bharatanatyam as an escape, as well as a connection to his cultural past.

Sairam explained the cultural significance of the dance.

"I think there's a lot of significance because we know there's no separating cultural practice and this art from religious practice, but also ethnicity and language, history, architecture, landscape and mythology, all of these different types of things," she said. "They're really kind of beautifully and hopelessly intertwined, I think. But then what's also culturally significant is that the sculptural evidence goes back thousands of years."

Sairam said that the dance has evolved over thousands of years and has even evolved based on the location it is practiced.

"When you think about how it has evolved in its practice in the United States, it is different than how it's evolved in its practice in the UK, from Southeast Asia, from Australia," Sairam said. "And there are significant communities in each of these areas all tied back to the same tradition, but each of them has added local flavor. And so I think that's the other cultural significance is that it's not just the root culture, it's our culture here. And that's what makes it ours. It's not somebody else's that we have to practice. We can actually evolve it as we are going along, of course within certain framework and aesthetic choices. And that is what's beautiful, that we made it our own."

Athena Ballolla and Acharya both also study Western art, Athena Ballolla as an actress and Acharya as a musician, and said learning the dance has given them a unique perspective in studying art.

"I think it also gives you a nice perspective and also it compliments nicely when you can find the similarities within multiple different art forms," Athena Ballolla said. "And it's actually quite surprising sometimes how similar they can be in different aspects, but then also different."

As a violist, Acharya said that learning Bharatanatyam helped him learn the complex beat patterns in Western music.

Athena Ballolla said learning to express emotion in dance is extremely helpful in her acting.

The pandemic threw a wrench in the two students' practicing, but they overcame the obstacles by practicing via Zoom, amongst other methods. They both said that the pandemic made them appreciate their community more.

Sairam expanded on their thoughts, saying that dancing by yourself for 2.5 hours takes immense courage, and her students depend on the community for positive energy to prepare them for that.

Sairam also shared that she tries to make the 2.5-hour performance almost incidental. The students must spend an immense amount of time with the poetry and music, which often causes the students to do a lot of personal reflection, she said.

"You end up growing a lot as a person in your way of thinking, let alone the physical aspect and the actual artistic aspect," Sairam said. "That's obviously a huge part of this, but I feel that personal growth is maybe the most important in that you can actually push your body to points where you weren't quite sure it could go. You push your mental energy to points where you're not quite sure you could go, then you realize, 'Oh, I can do it. I can do more.' And that's different each person, how they get there. That's what's fascinating for me to watch for each of them, how their process is different."