My Ethnography: The Mohiniyattam Dance

Classical Art Forms of Kerala: The Mohiniyattam Dance

by Camille Coy

The following paper is composed of information that I obtained from my Mohiniyattam teacher, Lonisha Vijayanath. She studied Mohiniyattam and Kuniyattam dance at The Kerala Kalamandalam for ten years. After she graduated she specialized in Mohiniyattam at the Kalamandalam graduate campus for two years. Natasha Lovaas, Sara Salaway and I were her first students. She taught us in the manner that she was taught: The teacher has no favorites, the student has no excuses, the student practices until they do it right and the student always respects the teacher. In class we would practice until we were too tired to continue, then open our books and take notes while Lonisha lectured us on the history and technicalities of Mohiniyattam.

The Mohiniyattam dance is a unique and graceful classical south Indian art form that has been preserved for hundreds of years by dedicated artists and scholars. India has a culture of stories and most performing art forms are based on these usually religious tales. Each tale has it’s own myriad cast of Hindu gods and goddesses and often contains a moral lesson. The dancers represent the goddess Mohini, an incarnation of Vishnu known as the enchantress. The stories are from the ancient texts the Mahabharata and the Ramayana. In the main story the elixir of life is being held by demons and the gods can’t get to it, so Vishnu takes the form of Mohini the enchantress and distracts the demons with her charm while the other gods get the elixir.

The dance uses lassya movements, a Sanskrit term meaning that the movements of the dance are loose, slow and ladylike. The movements and steps must be performed in this manner or they are wrong. The dance is a very precise and structured form. A mohiniyattam dancer must move slowly and every part of her body down to her heels must be in the correct position.

The movements and steps of the dance incorporate hand gestures, (mudras in Malayalam and hastas in Sanskrit) and facial expressions (nava-dressas in Sanskrit). There are twenty-four hand gestures that are used in Mohiniyattam and each one has several uses. The uses represent all kinds of different things, such as elephants or even vomiting. Most of these hand gestures have a corresponding facial expression. Most of the nine facial expressions are the various emotions of women, but several represent the emotions of gods or animals. They are used in conjunction with the movements and steps in order to communicate a story to the audience.

There is a specific repertoire for Mohiniyattam that dictates the different parts of the dance and in what order they are to be performed. Mohiniyattam falls under two classifications of all classical dances, Nritta and Nritya. Nritta represents purely the movements and steps of the dance without hand gestures or facial expressions. Nritya refers to the incorporation of movements, steps, hand gestures and facial expressions in order to convey an emotion or a part of the story. Each of these classifications refers to a part of the repertoire.

There are seven rhythms (or thalams in Sanskrit) that are the basis of all classical performing arts. Each one has a little bit of a different beat and changes the look or sound of the performance. Mohiniyattam mostly uses the thalam, chadoorestra jadi tripoodthalam.

The Mohiniyattam dance is the voice of Indian women of the past, and to a certain extent that of Indian women today. Each graceful flick of the wrist or stamping of the foot speaks a message of grace and power. The strict structuring of the dance and the dedication of the artists have gingerly preserved the past and allowed its message to seep into the modern Indian world.