Bharatnatyam and Hip Hop 

I was very lucky to travel to India as a student and learn about the religious cultures that make up the Southern states of Tamil Nadu and Kerala. The cultures and forms of expression in India are so complex, diverse and weighty that it served to completely reset how I understood what people are doing when they speak, write, cook, joke, play music, play games, dance… among many other things people do. 

Dance is not something I have a lot of experience with or any aptitude for, personally. It is something I admire and find enjoyable when I see it done well, but it had always seemed to me to be more akin to athletics than anything else––beautiful in form and physically impressive. But if it meant anything it was because of music or story or other things going on to support it. 

We all have moments of insight, and for me, India was where I learned what dance could be. I learned about the vocabulary of different dance forms, how they conveyed narrative and conflict and character. They were independent of other forms of expression, with music evolving out of the dance as much as the dance evolved out of the music. This was capped off when I was invited to see a Catholic liturgy that had adapted these dance form in a kind of interreligious collaboration to experiment and explore. That spirit of exploration and collaboration is alive and well as cultures merge and connect and become something else. If you don’t know, one of the great cultural exports from America to the globe of the past half-decade is hip hop music and its culture, and that includes dance. And in India, it has informed these ancient traditions and created something new. And we can learn about it because some of these performers are sharing their work. (Or, watch an example video here.)

Allan T. Georgia, M.Div., M.T.S., PhD

Sometimes it is hard to tap into our spiritual selves or find time to nurture our intellectual curiosity. Here is a section that reflects on some nourishing materials from around the web and related media channels in order to get us thinking, get us feeling, and get us reflecting on the lives we are living in this big, beautiful world. **Some Adult/Mature Themes May Appear in Links and Other Attached Material**