Halfway through her performance of Bharata Natyam dance last Friday, world-renowned Indian dancer Anita Ratnam paused to thank the Wesleyan community for inviting her to the University’s annual Navaratri Festival.

“[My former guru] said that Wesleyan was the musical university of the United States,” she said. “It is an honor for me and for my co-performers to be here.”

If anything, it is an honor for Wesleyan to host Ms. Ratnam. As the program notes, she is not only an accomplished dance—he is also a choreographer, a classically trained singer, and a scholar of theater and women’s studies who has performed, studied and taught worldwide.

“She has reconfigured the traditional format of Bharata Natyam,” noted Artist in Residence Hari Krishnan of the Dance department. He delivered the introduction.

Some members of the audience on Friday might have known exactly what it meant to “reconfigure” this classical Indian dance style, but many were content to simply absorb the sights and sounds of Ratnam’s dynamic program. Accompanied by three musician—ne playing the violin, one the mridangam (an Indian drum) and one singin—Ratnam began the performance with a dance meant to honor and invoke the Goddess. The dance started slowly and accelerated. At first Ratnam merely moved along to the music; eventually, as she accented certain beats with heavy steps that shook the bells around her ankles, she became an integral part of the song.

Ratnam continued to use her body as an instrument throughout the evening, although in her later dances she also used it as a storytelling device. Taking a break between the first and second dance, Ratnam introduced her audience to the ancient Indian tradition of “abhinaya,” or representational dance, by first explaining the story she was about to tell, and then “dancing” the story.

Even audience members who could not understand the singer’s words were able to follow the storyline of each of the three abhinaya dances Ms. Ratnam performed; her ability to physically express emotion and develop a character created a kind of universal language. In her second dance, Ratnam switched between male and female characters with ease, changing both her facial expressions and her body language to communicate the transition to viewers.

“Movement can be formed if you practice, but abhinaya comes only with experience,” Krishnan said of the style.

The value of her more than forty years of experience was plainly evident in the performance. She almost allowed audience members to forget that they were watching an intricately choreographed dance, as the overall joy and excitement in the air could easily make one forget her precise technique.

Both Krishnan and CFA Director Pamela Tatge point to Anita Ratnam’s performance as an exciting example of India’s rich culture, one that both honors the past and looks to the future.

“These are art forms but they’re also rituals, an extension of the Hindu religion through the arts,” said Tatge. “Watching Anita Ratnam is particularly exciting because she’s such a master.”

Krishnan, while recognizing Ratnam’s extraordinary skill as a performer of classical bharata natyam, emphasized that her particular style of dance represents an intersection between the traditional and the modern.

“It’s like repeating a jigsaw puzzle,” he said, “She has found new pieces and she has reconstructed the bharata natyam puzzle.”