Bharat Natyam is Tamil Nadu’s most celebrated art from, a tradition that demands of the dancer a detachment from worldly ties, a sublimation of the self to the deity and her art. Such devadasis “servants of God”, carried a temple tradition forward, till patronage shifted to the hands of the landed aristocracy who marked them with the stigma of courtesan ship.

Bharat Natyam is a dynamic earthy and extremely precise dance style. It is built upon a balanced distribution of body weight and firm positions of the lower limbs, allowing the hands to cut into a line, to flow around the body, or to take positions that enhance the basic form. Padams, poems on the hero-heroine theme, are a special feature of expressional dance that allow the dancer great scope for the enactment of the theme. The tempo of these love songs is slow and each phrase is crystallized into a specific mood and aspect of love.