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India: Online Video Archive for Performing Arts

Categories: South Asia, India, Arts & Culture, Good News, Music

“Shabda” means “sound” or “speech” [1] in Sanskrit, and it is the name given to a unique online archive [2] of videos presenting lecture demonstrations on various Indian art forms.

Started by three musicians, T.M. Krishna, H.K. Venkatram and Shriram Kumar, Shabda aims to bring [3] Indian arts and culture to a wider audience.

Inspired [4] by the TED talk [5] format, Shabda's creators invite experts in music, dance or theatre to give a lecture on the topic of their choice for twenty minutes.

A Shabda event has six to eight speakers [4], including talks for both scholars and those less knowledgeable about Indian arts. The founders hope that as well as being a source of information, the site will become a constructive, interactive community [6].

The lectures, which are all in English, cover a wide range of subjects. In the first Shabda talk [7], Lakshmi Vishwanathan demonstrated how a Bharatanatyam [8] dancer can effectively use music to enhance and elevate a dance performance.

Professor V.V. Subramaniam presented a lecture demonstration [9] on how the essence of music is interpreted and performed on the violin.

Brigha Bessel showed [10] how expressive techniques are used by a Bharatanatyam dancer.

Thumbnail and featured image show Bharatanatyam dancer Rama Vaidyanathan. Image by Flickr user Dalbera [11] (CC BY 2.0).