Art & Culture GK Questions with Answers – Page 19

Guru Bipin Singh was the teacher who systematised Manipuri dance and, with the Jhaveri sisters as his leading pupils, carried it from Manipur to concert stages across India.

Vempati Chinna Satyam was the guru who shaped the modern repertoire of Kuchipudi, the dance that takes its name from a village in Andhra Pradesh and is traditionally traced to the saint-poet Siddhendra Yogi.

The poet Vallathol Narayana Menon founded Kerala Kalamandalam in the twentieth century to revive Kathakali and the other performing arts of Kerala, and the gurus trained there carry the name of the institution before their own.

Protima Gauri, also known as Protima Bedi, founded Nrityagram near Bengaluru as a residential village where dancers live and train in the manner of the old gurukul, and she herself was a dancer of Odissi.

Kelucharan Mohapatra was the guru who, with Pankaj Charan Das and others, reconstructed Odissi in the twentieth century from temple sculpture and the surviving traditions of Odisha, and he trained a generation of dancers including Sanjukta Panigrahi.

Sitara Devi was one of the great Kathak dancers of the twentieth century, and Rabindranath Tagore is said to have called her the empress of dance after watching her perform.

Birju Maharaj belonged to the Lucknow gharana of Kathak and to the Kalka-Bindadin family of dancers, and he is the name most often set when this form is tested; Shambhu Maharaj and Lachhu Maharaj of the same family came before him.

Rukmini Devi Arundale founded Kalakshetra at Madras in 1936, and the institution reshaped the presentation of Bharatanatyam and trained most of the following generations of dancers in the form.

Onam is the harvest festival of Kerala and is kept in the Malayalam month of Chingam, which falls in August and September.

Bhand Pather is the traditional folk theatre of Kashmir, performed by hereditary players called bhands.

Srimanta Sankardeva, the fifteenth and sixteenth century Vaishnava saint and reformer of Assam, wrote the one-act plays called Ankiya Naat, and their performance in the namghar or the satra is called Bhaona.

Bidesia is the Bhojpuri folk theatre of Bihar created by Bhikhari Thakur in the early twentieth century.

Bhavai is the folk theatre of Gujarat, also seen in parts of Rajasthan. It is played in open ground before a standing audience, its accompanying instrument is the bhungal, a long copper pipe, and its sketches, called veshas, are short and satirical, often aimed at caste and social custom.

Yakshagana is the folk theatre of coastal Karnataka, performed through the night in the open with towering head-dresses, heavy make-up and loud percussion, and its episodes are drawn from the Ramayana, the Mahabharata and the Puranas; the singer who narrates and controls the performance is the Bhagavata.

Pavakathakali, also known as Pavakoothu, is the glove puppet tradition of Kerala, and it borrows its costume, make-up and gesture from Kathakali, so the puppet heads carry the same towering head-dress and painted faces.

Yampuri is the rod puppet tradition of Bihar. Its puppets are carved from wood in one piece, without the joints that rod puppets elsewhere have, which makes them harder to handle and demands greater skill of the puppeteer.

Ravanachhaya is the shadow puppet theatre of Odisha, and it is the most austere of the Indian shadow traditions: the figures are cut from deer skin, have no joints and are left uncoloured, so only a plain black shadow falls on the screen, and they are smaller than the puppets…

Tholu Bommalata is the leather shadow puppet theatre of Andhra Pradesh, and its figures are the largest of all Indian shadow puppets, made of translucent coloured hide so that the colours show on the screen; the stories come from the Ramayana and the Mahabharata.

Kathputli is the string puppet, or marionette, tradition of Rajasthan. The figures are carved from wood, painted in bright colours and dressed in long trailing skirts, and they are made without legs; the puppeteer works them from above with strings while a dholak keeps time and a sharp whistling sound…

The pena is a single-stringed instrument with a bamboo rod, a coconut shell resonator and a bow, and the pena khongba, the singer who plays it, performs at the Lai Haraoba festival and narrates the legends of the Meitei people.