Honouring the best

The ‘Annual Awards & Honours 2015’ of the concluding edition of ‘Dance DISCourse’, will be held on December 5 at 6 pm at Alliance Française de Bangalore.

This event is presented by well-known art historian, writer and scholar, Ashish Mohan Khokar, in association with Alliance Française de Bangalore and Bangalore School of Music. The event will honour excellence and contributions in the field of dance with five prestigious awards.

The list of awardees include Sheejith Krishna, Dr. Gowri Ramnarayan, Mayuri, Madhuri Upadhya, Padmini Ravi  and Radha Shridhar.

The programme will start with the ‘nadaswaram’ welcome, which will be followed by the screening of short video snippets of the past awards and events. Aishwarya Nityananda, a bharathanatyam dancer and ace disciple of Radha Shridhar, will perform at 6.15 pm, followed by a dance presentation by the Nritarutya ensemble at 6.30 pm.

This will be followed by a dance recital by bharathanatyam exponent and awardee, Padmini Ravi. The award ceremony will follow with ‘padapuja’ of the awardees and screening of screening of short films on them.

“As part of the Khokar Dance Foundation’s activities to celebrate deserving artistes, the foundation will bestow five awards annually named after legendary dance figures. The awards have a very clear criteria — they go to someone who has not received many national honours and deserves and values it much. An awardee must have 20 years of body of work behind and potential for atleast 20 more years and the awardee must serve the mission of the legend after whom the award is named,” says Ashish.

He adds that the awardees do not receive customary shining shawls or cash prizes but are bestowed with an internship with a professional dance company, organisation or group abroad and career linkages at home, to take their art forward.

This is the concluding event of the year 2015. The series is academic in nature, with the history of dance shown through archival films; the present showcased through live performances and the future, through question and answer sessions with the audience.

Past awardees include artistes like Sathyanarain Raju, P Praveen Kumar, Madhu Nataraj, Dr Sanjay Shantaram and Muralimohan Kalva, Jayachandran Palazhy from Bengaluru; Syed Salauddin Pasha (Delhi), Ramli Ibrahim (Malaysia); Navtej Johar (Delhi), Rahul Acharya (Bhubaneswar) and Prof MR Krishnamurthy, Jayalakshmi Alva, Lalitha Srinivasan and Dr Maya Rao.