CityView Magazine - Fayetteville, NC
Issue link: http://www.epageflip.net/i/14395
W More than a mentor | Asha Bala, opposite, has shepherded six girls in the past nine months through the rigorous paces of the arangetram. Her students include Sita Chandra, above, and Priya Dwivedi, far right. 58 | Aug/Sept • 2010 orlds collided as Sita Chandra, rising high school junior, sat calmly in her parent’s bathroom draped in a colorful costume – stitched by hand in her mother’s hometown in India – a copy of “Julius Caesar” in her lap. Sita read while three women tugged at her hair, applied layers of makeup to her feet, hands and face and talked about what was happening just days away: arangetram. It would be the culmination of years of dance lessons, but to compare this event to a recital is like comparing a wedding to an impromptu dinner date. The arangetram is a two-hour solo, a coming-of-age ritual that Sita would perform in front of 200 friends and family, many of whom flew in from India just for the occasion. Her parents rented Seabrook Auditorium at Fayetteville State University, hired caterers, a makeup artist and photographers, plus a live orchestra and singer to accompany the elaborate and beautiful, even haunting, dances that Sita would perform. Sita had dedicated almost an entire year preparing for it, balancing schoolwork at the Fayetteville Academy with a job as manager for the boys’ varsity basketball team, a place on the girls’ tennis team and community volunteer work. On the day of the arangetram, the boys played in the state playoffs, an event Sita had to miss, worlds once again colliding. Arangetram literally means to ascend the stage; it’s the first time a student takes the stage for her first full-length solo performance. She is evolving from student to performer, girl to woman, each piece in the solo more difficult than the last. The name only dates back as far as India’s independence movement in the 1930s, but it is based on the Bharata Natayam, a classical dance form developed more than 2,000 years ago in the courts and temples of South India. Once performed as an essential part of