Things I Tell My Students in Class
Beyond Choreography: What Are We Really Training For?
On technique, repertoire and the making of an artist
It is easy to measure dance training by what is visible.
How many pieces has a student learned? How much repertoire can they perform?How quickly can they pick up choreography? How many minutes can they sustain on stage?
These are useful questions. But they are not necessarily the most important ones.
A dancer can know many compositions and still have significant gaps in technique, rhythm, musical understanding or interpretation. Another dancer may know relatively little repertoire, yet possess an increasingly sophisticated understanding of movement, music and performance.
This raises a more fundamental question:
What are we actually trying to develop when we train a dancer?
If the answer is simply more choreography, then training becomes an accumulation exercise. But Bharatanatyam asks for considerably more.
The purpose of training is not merely to accumulate dances.
It is to develop the dancer who can carry them.
Choreography is material. Training builds capacity.
Learning choreography is exciting.
A new jathi challenges memory. A new composition introduces unfamiliar musical ideas. A varnam can open an entirely new landscape of physical and expressive work.
Repertoire is essential to classical training.
But choreography is the material through which many deeper capacities are developed.
A dancer must learn to organize the body with clarity. To understand rhythm internally rather than merely follow counts. To recognize musical structure. To sustain physical intensity without losing detail. To communicate text and emotion without reducing abhinaya to facial imitation.
Eventually, the dancer must also learn how to make decisions.
Where does a movement breathe?
What does a particular line of poetry require?
When should an expression remain quiet?
How does one hold stillness without losing energy?
How does the same piece change when performed in a small intimate space rather than a large theatre?
These questions cannot be answered by choreography alone.
They emerge through training.
Technique is not the beginner stage
There is sometimes a tendency to think of technique as something we acquire early and then move beyond.
Learn the adavus. Become strong. Move on to repertoire.
But serious dancers rarely leave fundamentals behind.
They return to them.
An adavu performed after two years of training and the same adavu revisited after twenty years are not necessarily the same experience.
The vocabulary may be identical, but the dancer has changed.
Alignment becomes more precise. Weight becomes more intelligent. Rhythm becomes less externally counted and more deeply embodied. Transitions become clearer. Unnecessary tension becomes easier to recognize.
The dancer begins to notice details that were previously invisible.
This is why foundational practice remains relevant throughout an artistic life.
Technique is not simply preparation for art.
Technique is one of the conditions that allows artistic freedom to emerge.
When the body has sufficient organization, the artist has more choices.
When the body is still fighting the vocabulary, interpretation becomes much harder.
Rhythm must become more than counting
Bharatanatyam cannot exist without rhythm. Yet there is a difference between being able to repeat counts and actually developing rhythmic intelligence.
At an early stage, counting is necessary.
It provides structure.
But over time, the dancer must begin to understand talam as something larger than arithmetic.
Where does the phrase sit inside the cycle/avartanam?
How does the movement relate to the percussion?
Where does a korvai gather momentum?
What happens when movement stretches across a musical phrase rather than landing squarely on every beat?
How does stillness interact with rhythm?
The dancer gradually moves from following rhythm to inhabiting it.
That transition takes time.
And it becomes particularly important as repertoire grows more complex.
Learning to hear the music
A dancer does not only move to music. A dancer performs inside music.
That distinction matters.
The more deeply a dancer understands melody, rhythm, phrasing, lyrics and compositional structure, the richer the possibilities for interpretation become.
A line of movement may technically fit several places in a composition. But one choice may feel more inevitable because of the way the melody resolves.
An expressive passage changes when the dancer understands the meaning, weight and sound of the words being sung.
Even silence within music can influence movement.
This kind of listening develops gradually. It requires exposure, repetition and attention.
And it is one reason classical dance training cannot be separated entirely from musical education.
The dancer does not need to become a professional musician.
But the dancer must learn to listen like an artist.
Repertoire should deepen, not simply multiply
There is enormous value in learning new work. But there is equally enormous value in staying with existing work.
A composition often reveals very different things at different stages of a dancer’s development.
Something learned at eighteen may feel entirely different at thirty.
A varnam first approached as a challenge of stamina and memory may later become a study in architecture, musicality, emotional pacing and restraint.
An abhinaya composition can change as the dancer’s understanding of language, relationships and human behaviour changes.
This is one of the remarkable qualities of classical repertoire:
the material can remain, while the artist continues changing.
That is why knowing a piece is not necessarily the same as having learned its choreography.
A piece can live in the body for years and still continue to unfold.
Correction is part of the practice
Training also requires developing a relationship with correction.
In serious artistic practice, correction is not punishment. It is information.
The teacher sees something the dancer may not yet be able to see.
Perhaps the weight is incorrectly placed.
Perhaps rhythm is being anticipated.
Perhaps a movement is visually correct but disconnected from the musical phrase.
Perhaps an expressive choice is too obvious.
Perhaps the dancer is working unnecessarily hard.
At first, students often experience correction as something that must be “fixed.”
With maturity, correction becomes more interesting.
It becomes a way of learning how to observe oneself.
Eventually, the dancer begins developing an internal teacher.
They notice.
They question.
They adjust.
And over time, dependence on constant external correction begins to decrease.
That movement toward independence is one of the most important developments in any artist.
Abhinaya cannot simply be added at the end
Expression is sometimes treated as though it can be placed on top of technically completed movement.
First learn the steps.
Then add expression.
But abhinaya is not decoration.
It requires its own form of training.
A dancer must learn how to understand text, context, character, intention and emotional progression.
Equally important is learning restraint.
More expression does not necessarily mean better expression.
A small shift of the eyes can sometimes communicate more than a large gesture.
Stillness can sometimes be more powerful than movement.
And emotional clarity is not the same as exaggeration.
These distinctions become possible only when the dancer develops observation, imagination and sensitivity alongside physical technique.
Performance is a different teacher
The studio teaches one set of lessons. The stage teaches another.
Performance introduces conditions that cannot be fully recreated in class.
Adrenaline.
Space.
Lighting.
Costume.
Musicians.
An audience.
The possibility that something will not go exactly as planned. A dancer must learn how to recover without revealing panic. How to pace energy. How to occupy space. How to remain attentive while performing material that may have been rehearsed hundreds of times.
Performance also reveals weaknesses very quickly.
A passage that feels secure in class may suddenly collapse under pressure.
Another may unexpectedly come alive.
For this reason, performance is not merely a reward at the end of training.
It is part of training itself.
But performance opportunities are most useful when they are supported by preparation rather than treated simply as exposure.
At some point, the dancer must begin making choices
In the early stages of training, imitation is necessary.
The student watches.
Copies.
Repeats.
Corrects.
This is how vocabulary enters the body.
But if training is successful, something eventually begins to shift.
The dancer starts asking questions.
They understand why one interpretation may work better than another.
They begin hearing musical possibilities.
They recognize when a movement feels borrowed rather than understood.
They become capable of making choices while still respecting the grammar of the form.
This is where training begins moving toward artistry.
Individuality does not mean abandoning tradition. Nor does it mean being different simply for the sake of being different.
It means developing enough knowledge, skill and sensitivity to inhabit the tradition with increasing depth and personal clarity.
Training beyond choreography
I think of training as a long-term process.
Technique matters.
Repertoire matters.
Performance matters.
But none of these exists in isolation.
The dancer is simultaneously developing physical intelligence, rhythmic understanding, musical sensitivity, expressive capacity, discipline, curiosity and eventually artistic independence.
Some of this progress is visible.
Much of it is not.
A dancer may spend months refining something an audience will never consciously notice.
And yet those invisible changes often transform everything.
This is one of the reasons serious training requires patience.
There will always be another composition to learn.
Another stage to perform on.
Another piece of choreography to acquire.
But repertoire alone does not create an artist.
The deeper work is slower.
It happens through repetition.
Through correction.
Through listening.
Through returning to fundamentals.
Through performing.
Through questioning what we think we already know.
And eventually, through learning to take responsibility for our own practice.
Perhaps that is what we are really training for.
Not simply to know more dance pieces.
But to become dancers capable of continuing to grow long after the choreography has been taught.
Comments