 | Thisbiography of a living personneeds additionalcitations forverification. Please help by addingreliable sources.Contentious material about living persons that is unsourced orpoorly sourcedmust be removed immediately from the article and its talk page, especially if potentiallylibelous. Find sources: "Chitra Visweswaran" – news ·newspapers ·books ·scholar ·JSTOR(March 2015) (Learn how and when to remove this message) |
Chitra Visweswaran is an IndianBharata Natyam dancer who runs a dance school, the Chidambaram Academy of Performing Arts, inChennai.
She was awarded thePadma Shri, one of the top civilian honours given by theGovernment of India, in 1992.[1][2][3][4][5][6]
Visweswaran began dancing at the age of three with her mother, Rukmini Padmanabhan, who was trained in contemporaryIndian dance and Bharata Natyam. Her father was an engineer withIndian Railways, and when his job took the family to London, Chitra began to studyclassical ballet. Later, inKolkata, she trained in theManipuri andKathak dance forms. At the age of ten, she went under the tutelage of T.A. Rajalakshmi, one of the bestdevadasis fromThiruvidaimarudur, who had settled in Kolkata. Herarangetram—her debut onstage performance—took place within ten months, an unusually short period, and she continued to train with Rajalakshmi for almost a decade.
At thirteen, Visweswaran choreographed the life ofSaint Tyagaraja in the form of avarnam, the most demanding type of piece in the Bharata Natyam repertoire. She wanted to move to Chennai (then called Madras) after finishing school to pursue a career in dance, but her parents insisted that she complete a college degree. She earned aBA in English from theUniversity of Calcutta while simultaneously studyingdance theory and thehistory of dance on her own time.
In 1970, she received a scholarship for advanced study in Bharata Natyam from theIndian Ministry of Human Resource Development at a time when only two such scholarships per year were awarded nationwide, compared with 25 today. She spent her four-year scholarship period studying in Chennai under Vazhuvoor Ramaiyya Pillai. Within three months, he chose Visweswaran over his other students to star in a dance drama he had choreographed. The musicologistP. Sambamurthy, the art historianKapila Vatsyayan, and the dance criticSunil Kothari all noted her work. Visweswaran is also well-versed in Rabindranritya, Rabindrasangeet, and Theater.[7]
Visweswaran started teaching dance in Kolkata at the age of sixteen, and in 1975, she established the Chidambaram Academy of Performing Arts (CAPA) in Chennai. Today, CAPA has satellite institutions around the world led by former students. Admission is highly selective, and graduates have received national and international scholarships and fellowships.
Visweswaran also raises money for RASA, an organisation that uses dance andmusic therapy for children withlearning disabilities.
In 1980, Visweswaran choreographed her first major dance drama,Devi Ashta Rasa Malika, which helped popularise the concept of group formations in Bharata Natyam. Several thematic solo productions followed, including:
One of her group productions explored the parallels between two women's approaches to poetry andbhakti: the South Indian saintAndal and theMewari princessMeera. In another work, a production of theRamayana, Visweswaran used a singleSanskrit kriti, translated intoTamil, to anchor the dance musically. She also producedDevaki Pulambal from the viewpoint ofDevaki, the mother ofKrishna, instead of the viewpoint of the story's traditional narrator,Yasodharā.
Visweswaran eventually dropped costumes from her productions, arguing that playing a character solely through mime, gesture, and stance was more challenging than playing a character in the expected costume.
In 1989, India'sNational Academy of Sciences commissioned her to create a production about theGanges river, not highlighting its religious connotations, but presenting it as representative of the ethos of India.
Visweswaran has performed in all of India's major dance festivals and has made several tours abroad, dancing in Australia,Austria,Bahrain,Belgium,Bulgaria, Canada,Fiji, France, Germany, Italy,Kuwait,Luxembourg,Malaysia, theNetherlands,Oman,Portugal,Qatar, Singapore,Sri Lanka,Sweden,Switzerland, theUnited Arab Emirates, the United Kingdom, and the United States.
She is regularly featured on the National Program of Dance and on local programs ofDoordarshan and other Indian channels. Her dances have also been broadcast byThe Mike Walsh Show in Australia, theSingapore Broadcasting Corporation,BBC Television, and networks in France, Malaysia, Portugal, Switzerland, and the United States. On the 50th anniversary ofIndia's independence, the BBC invited her to present a specially choreographed program atSymphony Hall in Birmingham that was telecast internationally on 15 August 1997.
In 1980, Sri Krishna Gana Sabha, an Indian cultural institution, gave Visweswaran its Nritya Choodamani award.[8] In 1996 and 1997, she convened the Sabha's Natya Kala conference, the only dance seminar of its kind in India. She is a trustee of theIndia Foundation for the Arts and a member of the Indian government committee that selects candidates for scholarships and fellowships in Bharata Natyam. She is theUniversity of Madras's Rabindranath Tagore Chair in Fine Arts, and is also a member of the general council and executive board of theSangeet Natak Akademi, the top performing arts body in India.
The government of Tamil Nadu conferred the title "Kalaimamani" on her in 1982. She received the Sangeet Natak Akademi Award in 1987 and thePadma Shri from thePresident of India in 1992. In addition, in India's 50th year of independence, she was awarded the titles of Mahila Shiromani (distinguished woman of Indian origin) and Sthree Ratna (gem amongst women). TheJapan Foundation invited her to be its special guest in 2000. In 2013, she was the recipient of the Music Academy's Natya Kala Acharya Award for Dance. She has also presented her work at United Nations, UNESCO.[7]
Other honours include:
Visweswaran's husband, SriR. Visweswaran, a nephew of theCarnatic musician G.N. Balasubramaniam, was a vocalist, instrumentalist, and composer with extensive experience in film music. He played thesantoor,veena, andflamenco guitar, and had composed and directed music for his wife's productions.
