The Old Song and Dance

The 10,000-mile musical arc from North Africa to Japan is a scimitar of seeming non-chords and unrhythm. With Mauritania as the handle and the Maghreb as the hilt, the blade cuts through Persia and India and Indonesia before curving up to a tip in northern Hokkaido. Arabic music from Morocco to Pakistan sounds like a frieze of Kufic script encircling the dome of a mosque. What registers most is the lilt of the lifting voice and its sadness when in decline. Songs of new love are studies in how many ways musical ornament can be lifted up, and songs of waning love are infinitesimals of descents, just as lost love is of infinitesimals until suddenly you notice it is there.

From Kashmir through Assam is the great tableland of Indian music, the land of the raga, with its bamboo veena flutes and sitars and sarods and tablas crescendoing through time into a radiance of haste blinding the ear on into the night.

From Burma through Thailand and Vietnam the voice takes precedence in child-doll songs of love and faithfulness and sadness and dying. If a voice can ever be said to be porcelain set to music, this is where it sings. In Indonesia the dusk till dawn gamelan turns villages into carillons of bongs as people come and go, children play, and dogs chase each other through the evening dust. Here music and theatre entwine, gamelan accompanying Wayang Kulit's shadowmask theatre that's remarkably like Commedia dell'Arte.

Thence into China and Japan where no known rules apply and the sounds are truly a new planet to the ear. There music has an air of distant past or distant future, but seem not of a century any of us know.

To us, these sounds are like a visit by a stranger from another era transplanted into a New York necktie shop, trying to divine the meaning of such an object without having seen the myriads of men wearing them, much less the city in which they do so, still less the

newsprint describing why such an object is so important, and none at all the four thousand years of garment history which has resulted in such lavish devotion to a thin folded and tapered piece of cloth.

Our regularized twelve-note Western scale is spread out over five lines comprising tones and semitones, 2/4, 3/4, 4/4, and 6/8 rhythms, majors and minors, and instruments and voices trained to these confines. To us raised on it, the rest of the world's music is a necktie shop.

Ironically, the invention of the Western staff came about when an eleventh-century Italian Benedictine named Guido d'Arezzo heard some Brahminic music from India that had come to Italy by way of Persian and Arabic traders. (They also brought algebra and the concept of zero; although we call them "Arabic" numbers, our digits originated in India and imported by way of Indian Kerala Moors.)

Indian music and dance forms could travel so well because there existed a notational system for them based on an ancient Aryan document called Bharata Natya Shastra. Its author is so dimmed by antiquity that no one knows when he lived; suggested dates range from 100 BC to AD 200. The Bharata Natya covers the aesthetics and practice of music, dance, drama, and criticism. It is still regarded as a sacred book in India and to this day the classical dance of South India is called Bharata Natyam.

When Guido d'Arezzo saw the Bharata Natya notational system he devised a Westernized version originally called "the Guidonian hand." Its purpose was to facilitate sight reading by monks in monasteries and by secular priests in castle and countryside. Guido also developed the ancestor of our "do-re-mi-" system of musical intervals. Because "do-re-mi" has eight tones, Guido's original staff consisted of four lines, with the semitones in between the lines. Later, when musicians wanted to add octaves above and below, they added the fifth line to bridge the high "do" with the next higher "re." To this day we can only speculate what Charlemagne's ears heard in the year 800, what congregations heard at the Cathedral School of Chartres in 900, or the laments heard in chapels throughout all Christendom in the year 1000 when the world was supposed to end. But we can recreate almost exactly what was sung at Cluny the year William the Conquerer set sail for England.

Against our 800 years of musical tradition, Indian music has roots going back 8,000 years. By 6000 BC great civilizations were emerging along the Nile, the Tigris and Euphrates, and the Indus. In what is now Pakistan, two ancient cities named Mohenjo Daro and Harappa developed along the Indus and their trade routes followed the Fertile Crescent to Ur and thence to Alexandria. That is how Chinese jade came to the sarcophagi of Egyptian pharaohs.

That dance and thus by extension music existed at Mohenjo Daro is conveyed to us in the form of a delightful four-and-a-half-inch-tall slender long-legged dancer with one arm entirely covered with bracelets and the other cocked jauntily on her hip, and a haughty face distinctly Dravidian. She wears a three-lobed necklace and has the small, pointed breasts one sees all over South India and Sri Lanka today. To judge from the exquisite modeling of her body, a bronze smith spent a lot of time on her, which says a great deal about the role of art in life then.

The Indus Valley cities were invaded by a warlike tribe starting about 1500 BC. These newcomers were a light-skinned race of people thought to have originated in the territory lying between the Danube and the Volga. Called Aryans, they first settled in Mesopotamia, then migrated through Persia and eventually into India. A Mesopotamian chronicler said of them, "They were an onslaught of people who had never seen a city." A communal grave in Mohenjo Daro contains dozens of huddled skeletons with smashed skulls, from which you might gather an impression of the Aryan way of invading things. "India" is not a word of Indian origin, nor is the word "Hindu." These terms don't appear prior to the Aryans. The Indus River was known as "Sindhu" to the Aryans, which was converted to "Indus" by the Persians. The Greeks under Alexander the Great crossed that river, then took the name with them back through Alexandria in Egypt, where the early mapmaker Claudius Ptolemy incorporated it into his Cosmographia whose various editions throughout history brought us the phrase we still use today. Ptolemy was updated several times, especially in the fifteenth century when European ship masters were re-drawing the limits of knowledge.

The Aryans called their new home "Aryavarta" when they wanted to refer to political boundaries, and "Bharat" when they

wanted to refer to their culture. Eventually the word dasa which they used to describe "enemies" came to mean "subjects" and they settled in for good. With that India entered the Vedic period of its history. Hardly had the Aryans finished leaving their litter of skeletons than they developed the first great epic in South Asian literature, the Rig Veda. Like much ancient literature such as the Gilgamesh tale and Deuteronomy and Leviticus in the Bible, the ancient epic tended to sanctify land grabbing.

All we know about life on the subcontinent for the next thousand years comes from the Rig Veda and its successors, reinforced by the spadework of archaeologists. With the Rig Veda came the arts of singing and dancing. One reason was that there was no written Rig Veda for centuries; it was memorized and publicly recited much in the same way as were Norse and Icelandic epics and Celtic legends. Music helped the reciter and dance provided entertainment while he wetted his whistle — these recitations, after all, went on for days.

The Rig Veda was followed by the Yajur Veda, Sam Veda, and Atharva Veda, all dealing mainly with behavioral issues, and the Ramayana and Mahabharata, which deal with Aryan imperialism. The Aryans also introduced the caste system whose distant tremors still shake the land today. The word "caste" is a sixteenth-century Portuguese coinage. The original Aryan word varna meant "color", and from light to dark came the four original varnas: brahman (priests), kshatriya (warriors), vaishya (farmers), and shudra (serfs). The darker you were the lower you were. That the Aryans feared dilution of their superiority by intermarriage comes down to us in the Vedic invocation, "O Indra, find out who is an Aryan and who is a dasa, and separate them!"

The brahmins assumed the role in Aryan society that the Franciscans assumed in late medieval and Renaissance Europe: you had to pay them if you wanted the religious observances that would save you. The brahmins thoughtfully placed themselves at the top rung of the social ladder as the arbiters of everyone's behavior. The brahmin attitude about human concourse could teach today's psychologists a few things about the relationship between arrogance and fear. But the varna system also interlocked social standing, economic level, and religion in such a way that society existed

without tensions, and it brought about a division of labor that eliminated the need for slavery.

The massive Aryan displacement in North India was much sparser south of India's dense central forests and highlands, the Deccan. There the Aryans were mainly missionaries and traders. Hence the Dravidian peoples — and anthracite color — are much less diluted. In North India today it is not uncommon to see the phrase "wheaten skinned" in a newspaper advertisement soliciting a suitable bride — a term you'd never see in the South.

About 500 BC the Aryans were trading up and down the coast and encountered an island southeast of Cape Comorin. At that time the island was peopled totally by aboriginal Yahksas, Nagas, and Veddahs; all except a few remaining pockets of Veddahs have vanished into intermarriage or battlefield burial mounds. Although Lanka's epic poem the Mahavamsa cites a pretty story about an Indian maid carried off by the lion Sinha, falling in love with him, and bearing the Sinhal people, the unromantic truth is that the Aryan stock which comprises about seventy percent of Sri Lanka today came first as traders, then settlers, then missionaries, then emperors. The Dravidians in South India hankered after the same Lankan territory and trade, and to this day the longest-festering social conflict in Sri Lankan is the inability to reconcile the nontheist Buddhist, lighterskinned, easygoing Sinhalese way of life with the polytheist Hindu, dark-skinned, aggressive Tamil way.

The religious differences alone seem almost irreconcilable. Tamil Hinduism evolved over thousands of years; Sinhalese Buddhism was achieved in a single moment of Enlightenment. Hinduism is polytheistic; Buddhism has no god at all (a Buddhist can believe in a god if he or she wishes, but a god doesn't help achieve Enlightenment). Hinduism depends on an elaborate system of castes and sub-castes; Buddhism teaches that all people are equal (but doesn't practice it that way). Hinduism provides many paths to the gods; Buddhism provides the Dhammapada. Hindus venerate the cow; Buddhists eat it. A Hindu kovil is such an exuberant assortment of figures, colors, motifs, and embellishments that it makes the front of Notre Dame seem like a first effort for Decorative Arts 101; a Buddhist dagoba is so serene in its dome on a lotus plinth its

simplicity is surpassed only by the absolutely unadorned mud-andwattle domes that honor Muslim holy men.

Attitudes about religion are the only one source of estrangement in the Sinhal/Tamil conflict in Sri Lanka today. Skin color and and language are two others. The roots go back to when the first Aryan brahmins found their way into Dravidian South India. Being so few, the brahmins held onto their color-based caste system much more fanatically than their brethren in the north. They set themselves in the same superior-minority role that so many South African whites practice today. History is fastened with millennium-long nails, and the arrogance of Aryan brahmins in the Tamil-speaking regions stretching from Madras south to Kerala created a hostility to lightskinned Indians that seethes to this day.

After the Buddha died in India, his teaching was slowly subverted by brahmins worried about losing their exalted status; they turned the Buddha into one of the ten reincarnations of Vishnu, and therefore a mere sect of Hinduism. In Lanka, however, Buddhism was introduced in its more-or-less original form and became the dominant religion immediately upon its arrival with the Indian emperor Asoka's son Mahinda in 247 B.C. Unfortunately, the ancient Dravidian hostility to the Aryan brahmins has carried over all the way into our time. The conflict of brahmanism versus egalitarianism became Hinduism versus Buddhism. The racist "Buddhism and Sinhalese only" laws promulgated by the Bandaranaikes in the 1950s and 1960s poured fuel on embers which had been smoldering 3,500 years; today's Tamil Tigers are the direct result. The Tigers waged a religious race war until they discovered the money to be had in transshipping heroin. Today they are but revisionist brahmins using arrogance and fear to carve out a living for themselves.

Today's music and dance in India present virtually intact aesthetic ideas developed in the Bharata Natya Shastra written roughly 2,000 years ago. The word shastra means "teaching," but the term Bharata Natya translates with more difficulty. The word "bharata" meant "dancer-actor" but is also a personal name, so it is unclear whether we have a single author or a group of them as with the various Homeric storytellers.

Even though dance and musical performances based on the Bharata Natya tradition continued almost unchanged all the way into our time, the written document itself was lost for at least 1,000 years. European scholars knew of its existence by way of references in other Sanskrit works. Only in the middle of the last century was a copy found by a British scholar looking for something else. The Sanskrit version was published in 1898, and it came out in English in 1950.

In the Bharata Natya dance is either margi (sacred to the gods) or desi (for the pleasure of humans). Margi is supposed to have come to earthlings by way of the goddess of dance Shiva (who is also the god of destruction and renewal) via his earthling disciple Tandu. Margi is usually considered to be a dance form for males because of its Shaivite origin and the fact that expresses actions and feelings with virile strength. Desi is more delicate and graceful and is said to have been given to humans by Shiva's consort Parvati, who taught it to Usha the daughter of the sage Bana, who passed it on to the women of India.

Desi dance was a specialty of temple consorts called devadasis. Temple consorts were a revered institution in many places those millennia ago — the Mother Goddess was worshipped venerically as Isis, Aphrodite, Mylitta, Venus, Ceres, and of course Parvati; and described by chroniclers as diverse as Herodotus, Socrates, Plautus, Justin, Eusebius, Apollodorus, and Saint Augustine — the last of whom must have raised some eyebrows in the later Middle Ages as they wondered how, exactly, he had come to know all this.

Far from being considered harlots, devadasis were an important part of sacred worship — the word devadasi means "the god's consort". As such the practice was extensive and highly ritualized. The seventh-century AD. Chinese traveler Hiuen-Tsang was astonished to find four hundred consorts inhabiting the temple of Multan. The devadasi was considered a woman of such social standing that her presence was sought for and an honor at weddings as a sign of the favor of the gods.

Girls became devadasi is several ways. A firstborn daughter could be pledged to the temple in hopes that the gods would send a son as the next child. Couples also donated daughters in fulfillment of a promise made if a desired event in their lives would occur.

Sometimes a couple whose marriage had borne no son would give a daughter to the temple with the understanding that the daughter would then acquire the legal status of a son and perform in his stead at funeral rights; the daughter would also be able to inherit the family property. Unmarried daughters, the bane of a Hindu family because they were considered economic handicaps, would get rid of them by means of the temple.

Once installed in the temple at the age of about seven or eight, the girl underwent rites in which she was formally married to a god. At puberty she was deflowered by the chief priest and made available to worshipers. Her income was turned over to the temple priests. Daughters born to devadasi were considered especially sacred, and turned into devadasi themselves. She also learned the intricacies of desi dancing, and without the refined sensuality of the temple consort tradition the form might have never been developed; ritual dance traditions were evolved to please gods, not humans, while rural dance traditions evolved to please humans, not gods.

As margi and desi were the evocations of the dance, natya, nritta, and nritya were (and still are) its components.

Natya is the dramatic element, the story line. There are remarkable similarities between natya and Greek tragedy. Both have a purpose more philosophical than entertaining. The dramatic form outlined by Aristotle is made of fable, manners, diction, sentiments, music, and decoration; natya comprises postures, gestures, words, temperaments, music, and decoration. But the differences also are substantial. The Greeks used tragedy to create an antidote to passions through pity and terror. Tragedy in the Greek sense does not exist in Indian drama. Rather, tragedy gives courage and counsel. Greek drama emphasizes the poetry through which the plot is unfolded; in natya furtherance of the plot is mainly by visual action and staging. Greek drama uses graphic violence as a precursor to catharsis. Natya permits it only when presented as beauty.

Nritta, on the other hand, is "pure" dance, the rhythms and movements of the body. It contributes nothing to sentiment or mood. It is the hand, foot, and body moving through space. Had Merce Cunningham lived in India, his inventions would be considered nritta.

suggests mood, a glow of feeling cast over natya's drama. Facial expressions and gestures do everything. Nritya's emotions overlay nritta's motions. The uniting of all these elements into one sensibility is called abhinaya, which derives from the Sanskrit terms abhi ("towards") and ni ("to carry"). A successful "carrying forth" of the drama — exactly as with Western opera — comes about through the combining of body gestures (angik); costume and make-up (aharya); poetry, song, music, and rhythm (vachik); and physical expressions of emotional states (satvik). These are further broken down into thirteen head movements, thirty-six kinds of glances, seven eye movements, nine movements for the eyelids, and seven movements for the eyebrows. The neck has nine gestures and the chin has seven. Hand gestures, number sixty-seven for each hand alone and an additional thirteen for both hands. Thirty of these are pure dance; the rest are nritya movements evoking a mood. The dancer must also master thirty-two movements for each foot.

All this detail is set forth in the Bharata Natya. Yet Bharata's cornucopia of the dance is a dust mote when compared with the penaplain theme of the Bharata, namely that all arts are one art. The Bharata illustrates this with the story of a king who wished to carve sculptures of the gods. He went to a sage to learn how. The sage advised him, "You will have to learn the laws for painting before you can understand the laws of sculpture." The king replied, "Then teach me the laws of painting." The sage answered, "It is not possible to learn the art of painting without learning the art of dance." To which the now-irritated king replied, "So instruct me in the art of dance." The sage said, "That would be difficult, because you first must know the principles of musical instruments." The exasperated king was now ready to give up, but made one last try: "Then teach me instrumental music!" "I cannot," the sage concluded, "until you have mastered vocal music, for the voice is the mother of all the arts. Now repeat after me: Sa, Re, Ga, Ma, Pa, Dha, and Ni."

And so with the Indian seven-note equivalent of our eight-note do-re-mi-fa-so-la-ti-do, the king began.

As Indian musicians consider the voice the most primal of musical instruments, and the voice can sing only one note at a time, to this day they have disdained multi-note harmonies and ensemble

music. They prefer one note at a time, though sometimes these notes are so amazingly fleet that you cannot comprehend voices so agile.

Western attempts to understand the music and dance of the East began two centuries ago. Musical historians of the time, mostly British, had made a fair stab at trying to divine Greek and Egyptian music based on reconstructions of the ancient musical instruments depicted in tombs and on statues. Considerable imagination was involved and to this day any "ancient Greek" music is strictly guesswork.

These historians had ears trained in tones and half-tones, unvarying meters like 4/4 and 3/4, ascending/descending scales both in the same key, and structures as defined and rigid as the sonata and concerto. They found it difficult to comprehend the aesthetic steel behind the cutting blade of the pan-Asian scimitar.

The first attempt to explain Indian music was written by a British High Court judge named William Jones in 1784. Titled "On the Musical Scales of the Hindoos," his essay confronted the problems of trying to translate the common Indian rhythms of seven, eleven, or fifteen beats into something English musicians could play. A later musicologist "regularized" Indian rhythms by converting them all to 6/8. This is akin to "regularizing" the alphabet by cutting out all those rascals that can be pronounced in more than one way, the vowels.

Asian musical scales were an even tougher nut to crack. The idea of a five-line staff tidily divided into full and half tones simply did not exist. The harmonies of perfect fourths, fifths, major and minor thirds, major and minor seconds, and octaves were as foreign to Asian ears as microtones were to Western, at least until people like Steve Reich and Phil Glass came along. This led many musicologists, particularly those in academia, to conclude that Asians had no sense of tune or rhythm and therefore their music was inferior to the West's. This is what happens when one looks for what a thing isn't rather than what it is.

Ironically, at the same time European dance historians were confronting the problem of devising a notational system to record dance steps, positions, and floor patterns. At the time there was no such system in existence, no dance equivalent of the five-line staff.

They eventually came up with "orchesography", which recorded body positions and floor patterns with sufficient accuracy that today choreographers can recreate a dance by the famed nineteenth century ballerina Petipa or Diaghilev's creations for the Ballets Russes. The system was successful because it employed no scale of lines. The only standardized referents were a sequence of symbols that conveyed a specific motion. A linguist confronting this notation would conclude it to be the most complex language in existence, which indeed dance is.

Western musicologists never considered the idea of a blank sheet of paper, hence is no surprise that the breakthrough in the notation of Eastern music came from outside academia. A British linguist named Alexander John Ellis (1814-1890) was pursuing research in the psychology of hearing and one day heard Eastern music for the first time. He immediately became interested in the phonics of Asian and African hearing. Applying the logic of the phonic system of language teaching to music, he pointed out that Asian music is not founded on a law of harmony but rather microtones and rhythms that dissolve into each other and re-emerge transfigured into new tones which assume lives of their own before being dissolved thence again; Indian music is amoeba-like rather than symphonic.

Ellis eliminated the Procrustean five-line bed and devised a notational system based on the Western staff being divided into 1,200 "cents" — the twelve Western tones divided into 100 microtones each. Each 100 "cents" corresponded to one Western semitone. Hence the interval between C and C-sharp could be divided into 100 microtones. Ellis determined that the Indian scale of twenty-two srutis that comprise India's seven do-re-mi (Sa-Re-Ga) notes consists of "cents" values of 22, 70, and 90 — or to put it another way, 22, 70, and 90 percent of the distance between C and C-sharp. Similarly, the seven-tone pelog scale of Indonesian gamelan music consists of microtones corresponding to 165, 250, 120, 150, 270, 150, and 115 cents played in that sequence.

The accuracy of the cents system was borne out when ethnologists began recording Asian music using Thomas Edison's device in which a needle vibrated a groove into a wax-coated cylinder. A study of the waveforms on the cylinder confirmed that

Ellis's system was accurate. Somewhat later the American Charles Seeger invented the oscilloscope, which in its early form recorded sound waves using a heated stylus to melt the coating on a special plastic graph paper. For the first time sound of any kind could be quantified and easily read. Ellis's system passed that test as well.

Asian music has none of the decorous rigidities one finds in concert halls. Music isn't a walk through the graveyards of Beethoven and Stravinsky, it is a walk through village life consecrated as dance. People come and go, but they don't speak of Michelangelo. Like the lore-tellers of New Guinea using storyboards as signposts on their meandering epics, Asian performers prefer elaborate personal interpretations of simple, familiar themes. Oddly enough, while "classical" musicians live in a five-line straitjacket, Western stage designers have no such set of rules. Hamlet staged in a reproduction of the Globe Theatre or set in a small town in Georgia is still Hamlet, and Wagner's Ring staged in a laserium is still Wagner's Ring. Eastern musicians embrace cycles of repeated patterns with the same gusto as Irish fiddlers. Crescendos, climaxes, and diminuendos hardly exist; the idea is that the music flows always forward a note at a time like bubbles on an eddying stream — back-watering now and then, but on the whole moving on.

The gulf is broad between Indian and Sri Lankan dance today. The former is a product of a written tradition deriving from a single comprehensive text which has been refined to an almost unimaginably sophisticated expression of the woman in motion. The latter was transmitted male teacher to male student by word of mouth; to this day there is no written syllabus to guide the Sri Lankan dance student. Both use approximately the same methods of training, yet they are so different they might as well have originated on opposite sides of the planet, not sixty miles of oft-sailed water. Indian dance and Sri Lankan dance are a textbook study in what happens to a single art form when it is transmitted in one place by word of pen and in another by word of mouth.

Although Sri Lankan dance indeed originated in the Bharata Natyam, over the years it has shed so much of it that today's dance is a unique art form in the world. No other dance looks quite like it, and

any aspiring young dancer looking for ideas should spend some time in Sri Lanka's villages and academies. The country's foremost dance school is two miles north of Kandy.

A thirteenth-century frieze at the hillside temple of Yapahuwa depicts women dancing in poses reminiscent of Bharata Natyam. Old writings describe a dance that seems to contain faint echoes of Bharata Natyam, which was presented before a Sinhalese king about the time Chartres cathedral was consecrated in 1260. But that's the end of it. Although Sri Lankan dance has flashes of the footwork and facial gestures that embody the nritya expressive dance of Bharata Natyam and the natya storytelling of North India's Kathakali, Sri Lankan dance is almost totally pure nritta — pure form. There is litte story to be told. The various dances are either absolutely pure, that is, they exist solely to demonstrate the beauties of the body in motion, or they distill the essence of animals like the elephant and peacock and cobra via imitative acrobatics, then quickly shed them in a transcendence into the pure body of dancing human.

There are two kinds of Sri Lankan dance: mountain-region Kandyan dance, and low-country/coastal Devil dancing. Both still rely on male dancers, although the Kandyan style often uses women — particularly in exhibitions for tourists. This softens the almost hyperkinetic masculine energy that is the hallmark of Sri Lankan dance in general.

Kandyan dance funnels out into today from the Bharata Natyam style imported 2,200 years years ago into the courts of Anuradhapura and the ethos of Sinhalese Buddhism. For all practical purposes, Anuradhapura flourished for fourteen hundred years, in which time there was relatively little artistic exchange with India. Dance and the other arts developed pretty much on their own. During the two-anda-half-century period when the kingdom was ruled from Polonnaruwa, the influences of Mahayana and Tantric Buddhism added to the already heady Lankan style. Interspersed throughout all this time, the rises and declines of dynasties, good and bad kings, famines and bountiful times, cities rising and cities allowed to become ruins, the fluctuating fortunes of Buddhism, and periodic resurgences of cultural identity — all these affected Lankan dance in one way or another.

When the Portuguese began forcing conversions to Catholicism soon after their arrival in 1505, the Lankan rulers eventually ended up in Kandy. Kandy was so remote that it was not penetrated until three centuries later by the British. Hence the Kandyan high-country style evolved virtually without foreign influence for at least 2,000 years. When the British finally penetrated into the Kandyan kingdom until 1807, they by then had enough experience with the Sinhalese to know what to leave alone. Moreover, there wasn't any money to be made from the arts, so why bother with them?

In the low country along the coast, however, the Portuguese influence was enormous. Sixteenth-century Catholic art was far more interested in the Devil than the message of Jesus, so it is no surprise that low-country dance began to graft the Catholic pantheon of devils — the cast of eighteen which included Beelzebub, Asmodeus, Beherit, Balaam, Isacaaron, Eazaz, Caron, Zabulon, Nephthali, Elymi, Verrine, Baruch, Carreau, Ginnillion, Jabel, Buffetison, Concupiscence, and Leviathan — onto an already existing set of folk dances designed to exorcise the bad spirits that cause illness.

Kandyan court dance developed without brahmins using art to reinforce their rung on the ladder. The situation is analogous to today's New York fashion brahmins sanctifying their role through a sycophant local press while remaining in near ignorance of the inventiveness of the art-to-wear and quilt-to-wear movements across the rest of the country. In Buddhist Lanka there were no devadasi temples to sanctify the venery of the higher castes. In fact, the manipulation of sex for power simply never developed; even today there is in Sri Lanka virtually no use of sex to sell something. Bold print, yes; bold bosoms, no. Sri Lankan society — be it Buddhist Sinhalese, Tamil Hindu, Moslem, or Catholic — is not by any means a puritanical society. Sex is neither shameful nor tittilating; family comes first.

Because Kandyan dancing developed into an art of pure form. Since arts of pure form tend to carry expressiveness to the limits of physical ability, it came to be the purview of men. Kandyan dance is a proscenium dance, it almost always takes place on a stage with some form of focused lighting and is presented to a seated audience. Devil dancing is village dance, lighted by the moon and coconut-husk

copra torches; the audiences sits cross-legged on the ground and the dancers' stage is a semicircular woven palm-frond or cadjan-grass mat stretched along poles behind them.

There are two major differences between the two basic Sri Lankan dance styles: Devil dancing employs masks to anthropomorphize invisible beings; Kandyan dance is dance pure and simple. Devil dancing relates stories via spoken narratives; Kandyan dance employs mainly drums and horns.

What does this look like in actual practice?

A Kandyan performance begins with the entrance of three turbaned men, two carrying sinuous four-foot-long S-shaped horns and the third a conch. It isn't so much an entrance as an annunciation. The horns woe a mournful monotone and the conch pains the ears with a piercing hoooo. Then come ten drummers carrying cylindrical and flat-ended double-cone drums whose leather tympanum are tuned by zigzag leather strips completely encircling the hollow carved frame. These drums can be tuned by maneuvering one had around the drumhead while the other beats, just as with African "talking" drums. They have a wider tonal range than kettledrums.

The drummers slap and beat in absolutely perfect unison. Not once in the performance, with its hundreds of rapidly changing motifs of 3/5, 4/7, 11/13, 16/5 and other beat sequences overlain with doubled doublets (.. ..), triplets, quintuplets, and septuplets — seldom do you hear a beat out of time or someone behind or ahead of the others. It's as if they are all connected by some kind of invisible armature. There are only two tones: staccato slaps and deep-throated booms.

The drummers swing two-foot tassles dangling from their caplets in time to the beats, looking for all the world like propellers on giant whimsical beanies. They wear a sort of halter in reverse that ascends from the waist up rather than the shoulders down. It rises to the base of the pectorals, thus leaving the chest and shoulders bare. At the waist there flares out over their bums a bustle-like short skirtlet of red-trimmed black pleated cloth that ends at the middle of the curve. Their neckpieces look like gold and red collars from which the rest of the shirt has been removed. Gold rings pinch the muscles of their

upper forearms and biceps. Then, in an obviously scripted floor pattern, one drummer circles until he is offstage while the others follow. The horns exuent holding their instruments high as a kind of superhuman codware rising three feet over their heads.

All Kandyan dance follows a formalized sequence called vannama. The vannama itself is a poetic quatrain which sets out the motif of the dance — Gajanga is the majestic tread of the elephant, Turanga the horse's gallop, Naga the cobra's slither, Hanuma the antics of the macaque, and Asadrusa is homage to the Buddha. Altogether there are eighteen vannamas.

Each dance begins with a tanama, a poetical arrangement of meaningless syllables like "Ta-Na-Tam Ta-Na Ta-Na Ta-Na-Tam Na Na Ta-Na-Tam." These have descended 2,200 years from the "Dha-Din Dhin Dha-Dha Dhin-Dhin Dha-Thin Thin Tha Tha-Dhin" verbal percussion that you hear at Ravi Shankar concerts today.

The tanama sets the rhythm for the dance itself. Each line of the vannama poem is followed by a dance motif in which the performers advance stage front, retreat, step sideways, glide in circles, and move their hands in time with the drums. These precisely choreographed — and incessantly rehearsed — body and floor patterns are accented with leaps and whirls.

Each dance crescendos into a frenzied kastirama (recall that "rama" attached to anything means "godlike"). No words can describe what happens during this finale, but if you can imagine Baryshnikov on speed, you won't be far off.

At this point the audience applauds — rather subdued applause, oddly enough, considering what the dancers have just done. And then a strange thing happens. Instead of going offstage, the dancers begin a miniature version of the dance itself, a kind of codicil to it. All the leaps, whirls, and poses of the original dance are repeated in miniature. Called the adavva, this codicil is, so far as I know, a custom unique to Sri Lankan dance. The entire dance is repeated, but this time with an almost stately reverence. It is as though the adavvga is a prayer of thanks for all they have been enabled to do.

The foregoing is the general vannama structure of all Kandyan dance; each dance itself can vary wildly within the framework.

Dance I begins with a drummers' entrance of high kick-strut steps. They fan out stage right and stage left, then kneel into a half-lotus pose with one leg under their bodies and adjust their drums across their knees. The dancers enter and bow three times to the drummers. They warm up with turning kicks and mudras (hand positions conveying a symbolic meaning) that resemble the mudras of Cambodia and Thailand. All wear a skirtlet-like sarong that descends to the knees and has an open front to facilitate free movement, with black silk pajama pants beneath which clasp tightly to the ankles. They wear silver epaulettes on their bare shoulders and thick gold necklaces. Their headwear, called a ves, looks like a cross between a high school prom tiara and Cecil B. DeMille's idea of a pharaonic burial mask. Its semicircular front is assembled from silver-plated wood pieces from which tiny silver "bo tree" leaves dangle and a radiant of silver spikes ascends behind. It is edged with silversequined trim.

The entire repertory of the first dance is done ensemble — rotations, simple floor patterns, weaves, face-offs. All movement is in the arms and lower legs; waists and torsos are almost rigid. The pace accelerates and the floor patterns changes into two snake dances writhing in and out of each other. Thus they serpentine in a complex pattern of weaves until they finally go offstage. For this dance there is no adavva codicil.

A single dancer enters in Dance II, on his knees, hands above his head as in prayer, elbows out, one knee moving him forward as the other drags behind. The Cobra Dance, like other dances evoking animals, is a pure dance that only superficially attempts an accurate portrayal of the creature. Only the first few moments of the dance are needed to inform the audience of the theme; thereafter the dancer is on his own. The idea is not that the dancer becomes the animal, but rather that the animal becomes the dancer.

The costume is a gold headdress shaped into a cobra's hood, an elaborate chest shield in four metallic panels, waist skirtlet in black and silver with four pleats in front and ten behind, a greenish-copper sarong split up the front with a red frieze at the bottom, and gold bracelets with flaring shields that cover the backs of the hands down to the knuckles. After circling stage front in the cobra's glide, the

dancer abruptly stands, sheds the animamorph snake as the real snake sheds its skin, and begins a slowly accelerating series of balletlike leaps and leg lifts, arabesques, and something that looks like a pas de chat — a balletic pussyfoot step — danced Thai style. When I say "accelerate" I mean he starts at 60 M.P.H. and goes up till his body speedometer is on the pin. It is incomprehensible how a body can move this fast and still stay in control; I fully expected him to spin out at some point and go flying offstage. A final series of ten great spinning leaps and the drummers slow quickly into a grave dirge of beats as he slows with them, back into his slither, and then offstage. When the audience applauds, as in all Kandyan dance, the performers never return onstage to acknowledge it. No adavva to this dance, either.

Dance III begins with drums offstage lowly thrumming like raindrops on a tin roof. They abruptly break to a thunderclap of roars, rhythm one-two, one-two-three; one-two, one-two-four; one-two, one-two-five; and on upward. Lord knows how they keep count after one-two-twenty or more. The dancers enter wearing grotesque devil masks twice the size of their torsos. This is the Kandyan interpretation of the village low-country dance. The faces on the mask are grotesque toothy grimaces with stuck-out tongues, piggish snouts, and beady "evil eyes." Large panels carved with a total of eighteen horrible faces flare from the temples like giant elephant ears. These eighteen devils symbolize the eighteen physical maladies the devil dance can exorcise. They were derived from the eighteen Catholic devils transmitted via the Portuguese. No one knows how many existed before this, as devil dancing, like Kandyan dance, is an unwritten tradition. Below the mask each dancer wears a white chemise that stops at the breastbone, and a vest with a scallop-like cutaway that reveals the latissimus muscles. They wear knee-length red, yellow, and black striped pantaloons over black pajamas clenching at the ankles, and silver anklets hooked to their feet with an clevis device that looks like a stirrup whose wheel is stuck between their toes.

Slow upper body motions lead into a skip-step-kick pattern in circles encircling each other all over the floor. It is reminiscent of the letterforms of the Sinhalese script, which looks like an alphabet of

copulating bubbles. Then into deep reverse backbends that snap forward until the top of the mask touches the floor. I thought immediately of lower back problems later in life. Then into a series of spins so quick they reminded me of a ballerina doing the Black Swan's thirty-two fouettes in Swan Lake. After the applause, the whole was repeated in the stately majesty of the adavva.

Dance IV was a solo of the troupe's largest man. He entered ponderously, scooping his hands up from the floor to over his head, then writhing them in various twists and curls all around the front of him. His chest was covered with the Kandyan dance signature breastplate of a series of half-dollar sized silver medallions strung together horizontally and vertically with beadwork. There was a simple yellow scarf around the forehead and brown pantalon with yellow skirtlet and white pajamas. His steps were the most kathakalilike of all the dances, and it was clear he was relating a story. Later I learned the story was about the mythical elephant Gajanga who has eight long tusks and sixteen trunks and lives in heaven. But then the slow dance ends — and this is quintessentially Kandyan — and the dancer erupts into a frenzy of leaps, spins, waving arms, rhythmic shimmies, and body bends that in no way resembles the jellylike gait of an elephant. Heavenly Gajanga has come into the dancer, who dances Gajanga into the life of the Earth. He ends with his hands in prayer just touching his beauty eye, the universal greeting to the Buddha when standing before a vihara. The adavva was the elephant as elephant again, galumphing offstage in a series of plods.

Dance V was a vaudevillian balancing act of twelve dancers using nine wooden spinners that look like a top on which an elephant has sat. The disks are flat on the bottom, with a pencil-eraser sized pit in the center and truncated conical sides rising up two inches and an inch inward. These disks derive from two ancient sources. One is the style of hat worn by the Anuradhapura nobility, which on old Buddhist temple frescoes resemble a tam o'shanter without the fuzzball at the top. The other is a weapon in the armory of the Sinhala monarchs called the pantheru. This was a disk much like the one the dancers use but with a more blade-like edge. Like a boomerang or frisbee, it had the property of returning to its thrower. The idea was to

throw it at the neck of a victim, cut his throat, and have it return for the next victim — remember Oddjob's top hat in Goldfinger?

This dance is called the Raban after an accompanying instrument that is a combination of single-faced hand drum and a tambourine. The dancers begin by throwing their pantherus twenty-odd feet into the air and catching them, still spinning, dead center on the tips of their forefingers. Then they throw the disks in high arcs to each other and catch them the same way. When they want to speed up the decelerating disks they move a finger slightly off center then wiggle it at just the right point in the rotation to accelerate it.

Then they set the spinning disk atop a six-foot curved stick with a pointed tip, lift the stick to their tongues, and balance it there. For the finale they pick up a four-pronged stick with one prong in the center and three others splaying equilaterally to the side. As soon as four disks are spinning on these the dancer elevates it and holds it on his tongue while picking up a second four-pronged stick and setting disks spinning on that as well. This he holds in one hand while setting the ninth and last disk spinning on a fingertip of his remaining free hand. They come down in reverse order and throughout all of this not one disk was lost.

My notebook has thirty-odd pages of similar descriptions. There are dozens of Kandyan dances — seventeen devoted to the mythopoetic vannama animals alone. As Balanchine's ballet came out of the story dances of the Caucasus, Kandyan dance came out of the temple and folk dances of long-ago Anuradhapura. My descriptions here are but a twentieth of what one sees in actual performance; there is, after all, just so much dance one can expect of a pen. The best way to fully appreciate the vitality of Kandyan dance is to come to Sri Lanka, see the dance as performed today in the villages. There, performances take place sitting on a cloth under the pale luminophorescence of a waxing moon. The villagers gather, hundreds of them assembling before the flickering shadows of fires, amid singing and the rhythm of drums, the faces of bewondering children, squalling babies, the smell of palm-frond fires and cooking food, dogs racing through the dust, the dozen upon dozen of vividly hued saris becoming an immense tremor of the tribe, faces of friends now mythical beings, bodies now spirits, the secular turning to sacred,

known becoming unknown and all certainties vanishing into the safety of the imaginary.