Tamil scholar brings together Sangam poems, Bharatanatyam

CHENNAI: Tamil literature scholar S Raghuraman wears another hat. He is a resource person for Bharatnatyam dancers, providing them lyrics and songs for their performances. He culls poems from ancient Sangam age literature (300 BC- 200 AD) and converts them into songs for the contemporary times. This is significant because most Bharatanatyam performances now are tuned to later period Telugu and Sanskrit compositions.
"The themes of the Sangam poems are heroic and romantic and my effort over the past eight years has been to render them into songs for performing artistes," he told TOI. Well versed in Bharatanatyam theory and history, Prof Raghuraman has been working with leading Bharatnatyam exponents. He counts the few Bharatanatyam exponents who have featured in Sangam poem derived presentations: Kalanidhi Narayanan, Alermel Valli, Lakshmi Ramaswamy, Priyadarshini Govind, V P Dhananjayan and Shantha Dhananjayan, Anita Ratnam and Srilata Vinod.
He draws from anthologies of poems like Nattrinai, Parananooru and Iyngkrunooru. His wife Vanathy scores the music and dancer Lakshmi Ramaswamy choreographs the dance.
"We have done more than 150 songs from the Sangam period adapted for Bharatanatyam performances since 2006," says Lakshmi Ramaswamy adding that, "even if the audience does not understand the Sangam age Tamil, the mood of the singer and the emotions of the dancer touch them." With the help of imagery in the Sangam poetry, we create sculptures and try to simulate the period costumes, she explained. Lakshmi notes that 99 % of the Bharatanatyam repertoire uses compositions that belong to the post Tanjore quartet period of 16th century, whereas Sangam age compositions are around 2000 years old.
Danseuse Anita Ratnam is one of the few Bharatanatyam dancers who has tried to use songs from the Sangam period. She points out that the new generation of dancers is comfortable with frozen figurines of gods and goddesses as icons and finds it difficult to latch on to something abstract like Sangam period songs. These songs don't have a particular metre and are mostly words, at times incomplete lines that are suggestive and subtle.
The modern dancer has to sit for hours with the Sangam song composer and work really hard to set the 'taal' and 'raagam' and would prefer to use set compositions of known musicians of later periods.
V P Dhananjayan, prominent alumnus of Kalakshetra and dance teacher, notes that there are just a handful of Bharatanatyam dancers performing to Sangam period music. "Use of Tamil Sangam period songs is still at an experimental stage and performers have only been moderately successful at presenting it for comprehension of audiences," he says lamenting that the present day audiences have no patience to watch the slower paced Sangam age performances.