For a group of artistes from T.N., who had witnessed the tsunami in 2004 and the destruction after, a tour of Japan was an opportunity to help the people there who were affected by the tsunami in 2011.
Bharathanatyam guru Chinnamanur J. Krishna Kumar and two of his students visited Japan last month and performed at seven locations, and the proceeds went towards rehabilitation of the tsunami-hit.
“We were invited by a senior Bharathanatyam dancer Akemi Sakurai, 77, to perform in Japan. We were told that we would not be paid for our performances. We did not mind since we saw it as a chance to help the affected people, especially having witnessed the horrors in Tamil Nadu,” said Mr. Kumar.
The performances and lecture demonstrations were organised as part of the month-long celebrations of the 30th anniversary of Japan–India Society, Tokushima, 60 years of India-Japan Cultural Agreement and 2017 being the Year of India-Japan Cultural Exchanges. The tour was organised by the Japan-India Society, Tokushima, and Geethanjali Friends Society Connecting Culture, Osaka.
“At one location after I did a Rudra Thandava, the audience came over to ask about the mudras and the meaning of the whole piece. In some places, people had never witnessed Bharathanatyam performances or even seen women in saris,” he said.
“It provided my students Harshitha Rajaram (a B.E.Mechanical Engineering student in VIT University, Vellore) and Preethi Divakar (a B.Com student in M.O.P. Vaishnav College, Chennai) an opportunity to witness a different culture,” he added.
