The Nova Dance Namaskaram

"In bharatanatyam practice, the namaskaram is the routine sequence

performed at the start and end of a bharatanatyam session to

express gratitude to God, the audience, our guru, and Mother Earth

for letting us dance on Her. Your hands first meet at your chest

in katakamukha as you stamp right foot, then left; you descend to

murumandi as your arms stretch outwards encircling your periphery;

in chatura your index, middle, and ring fingers meet the ground then

your eyes; you finally rise with right palm touching left in anjali. The

Earth is prepared for dance.

Nova Bhattacharya has abstracted the traditional namaskaram

into nine epithets that can be interpreted through movement at your

own will: hand to heart, sound, circle, reach, Mother Earth, forgiveness,

universe, ancestors, humanity. We encourage you to build spontaneous

movement to each epithet of Bhattacharya’s nine-move

namaskaram, and in doing so, while asking for forgiveness from the

Earth about to bear our weight, reflect upon the original caretakers

of this land, too – those whose dance was forcibly denied yet continues

to beat across Turtle Island. We can commit ourselves and

future actions to the struggle for Indigenous sovereignty. There is no

liberatory future for dance without this movement."

~ Excerpt from Brannavy Jeyasundaram’s “Every Ground has a Heartbeat” the opening essay of