కూచిపూడి

The village of Kuchipudi sits in the Krishna district of Andhra Pradesh, India. It has been a settlement of Brahmin families for centuries. In the fifteenth century, a Vaishnavite monk named Siddhendra Yogi created a dance-drama called Bhama Kalapam, based on the story of Satyabhama, one of Krishna's wives. He taught it to the Brahmin boys of Kuchipudi village. The dance was a devotional act, performed exclusively by men, exclusively in the temple, and exclusively by members of the village. It was not a performance tradition. It was a prayer.

For roughly four centuries, Kuchipudi remained a village practice. The boys of Kuchipudi learned the dance as part of their upbringing. They performed for festivals and temple occasions. The dance traveled no farther than the nearest temple. The word Kuchipudi meant the village, and the village meant the dance. There was no separation between the place and the art form.

In the twentieth century, two forces opened Kuchipudi to the world. Lakshminarayan Shastri (1886-1956) began performing outside the village. His student, Vempati Chinna Satyam (1929-2012), founded a school in Chennai in 1963 and taught Kuchipudi to women for the first time. The transformation was complete: a male-only village prayer became a classical dance form performed by women on international stages. The Indian government recognized Kuchipudi as one of eight classical dance forms of India in the mid-twentieth century.

Kuchipudi is distinguished from other Indian classical forms by its use of speech. Dancers speak and sing while dancing — the form is closer to musical theater than to pure dance. A Kuchipudi performer stands on the rim of a brass plate and dances on it without stepping off, a feat that demonstrates both balance and the form's theatrical daring. The village of 500 families produced a national art form. The name stayed.