Interview - Himanshu Shrivastava: As a dancer I am an explorer, a seeker - Shveta Arora

Himanshu Shrivastava is a young Bharatanatyam dancer whom I have been watching with increasing respect and admiration over the years. He is a disciple of gurus Saroja Vaidyanathan, Rama Vaidyanathan and Kamalini Dutt. He is also a Sanskrit scholar and an established painter and artist. His own choreographies, like 'Shikhandi', have been thought provoking as well as technically mature and masterfully danced. During the pandemic, I have seen two short videos of his - 'Radhika' (for Anita Ratnam's Devi Diaries) and 'Baazi' - which surprised me with their made-for-camera ethos and their camera work, locations etc, standing out for their conceptual depth, visual richness and technical skill in just a few minutes, even in an overcrowded online dance video space. I thus spoke to Himanshu about being a dancer 'online' during these two years of Covid-19 lockdowns and restrictions.

Choreographing for stage and then adapting to video vs. choreographing innately for the camera...
In the pandemic, everything is new for everyone, of course. But somewhere, I could sense that now the breadth of my audience has contracted to one little hole in the camera lens-not a huge auditorium but one pinpoint. In dance, especially nritta, and especially the adavus, are always audience-centric. We make sure the profile is right from each side-a dancer has to be very careful about profile projection and the visibility of that makes a lot of difference. Thrown in this situation suddenly, I immediately understood that now I have to choreograph according to the camera. And here the only privilege, I felt, was-and it took me a little time to get this, obviously-I realized the camera can also act as the amphitheatre by going around you. So we need to discover this new technology, the lens of the new audience, in a different way. Initially, I started with a fixed camera and later started moving it. Obviously, I ruminated upon how a movie is made, the intricacies of movie making in the context of how to do choreography.

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