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Chapter IX
Dance and the Temple
It is a merry-go-round. One mask, one large stone-mask behind which all faces hide....of Oedipus and Gautam, of Galileo and Milton, of Curie and Mira....and of all the men who watch the long night....all holding hands.... all, for one brief moment, seeing through the hollow eyes of the mask....and dancing.... holding hands and dancing at the still-point in the centre of the whirlpool, where there is 'no dance, and there is only the dance.' -The Lotus in the Stone1
In the 13th century Lunavasähi temple, in the navacauki, just
outside the sanctum sanctorum, known as garbhagṛha, 'the womb', there are a number of marble columns with exquisite figures of dancers. The dance style of these figures has been traced to be Odissi, a style that flourished largely in the state of Orissa, on the east coast of India, more than a thousand kms away. These figures are about 50 cms high, and they depict a variety of dance postures. In one figure, as part of the hastak mudras, the hand of the dancer is beside the head in ardhapatāka, 'half flag' posture; the other hand rests by the chest. The dancer stands in the tribhanga, a triple-bend position of the body, with the right foot behind the left. As is typical of the Odissi style, the sculpture suggests how the toes of the right foot brush against the ground as it is brought to the front.
These figures all depict not a still posture of a dance, but that special state when the dance and the dancer become one; poet W.B. Yeats has expressed it thus:
O Body, swayed to music,
O quickening glance! How can I tell the dancer From the dance.2
In this temple, as a spectator, one can feel drawn into the joy and abandon of the dancers; the marble columns seem to act like lightning rods, absorbing energy from within a much wider field. Amongst these dancing figures there is one of such majesty and grandeur that one can no longer tell, as the poet suggests, 'the dancer from the dance'; she seems to be dancing and yet not dancing: a momentary, fleeting glimpse of the Lord in the garbhagṛha A column with images of has arrested her steps; her eyes open a little wider for the darsan - for the divine revelation. In awe and wonder, she brings her hands together to greet. Yet the hands barely touch; the dance and
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dancers, the Lunavasihi temple.
