Since, the Sattriya dance was evolved as a means of propagation of bhakti faith, it is a ritual dance which owes its origin in temple, called Namghar or Kirttanghar. Sankardeva the architect of this dance form, virtually, choreographed it for temple performance and it has been practising in the Sattra institutions till date with great reverence and due preservation from the irreversible demage of time. So, Sattriya dance has a living tradition of more than five hundred years behind it. Although the Sattriya dance is a ritual one and is a part of spiritual pursuits, it is not devoid of the paradigm of classical form and most of its components have derived their sanction from the treatises of dance and dramaturgy, viz., the Natya Sastra, Abhinaya Darpana, Sangita Ratnakara etc. This glorious heritage of Assam is a digest of pure dance (nritta), dance with abhinaya (nritya) and drama (natya). It is basically stylized as well as natyadharmi in character where suggestiveness rules the roost. It has a distinct set of angika, vacika and aharya abhinaya.
The name and the evolution of this traditional heritage, reveal that Sattriya is a consummate dance style having varied numbers of dance within its fold. Besides, as has been mentioned above, although Sankaradeva evolved this dance style in a dance-drama form, subsequently his able successor Madhavadeva introduced a series of dance numbers to be performed in a manner other than the dramatic. These two series of dance numbers have some distinctiveness of their own and cannot be placed in a single monolithic dance tradition. So, the Sattriya dance may be understood as a bicipatal dance style having two distinct categories of dance – (i) dance related to drama and (ii) independent dance numbers bereft of drama. Each category of dance has separate repertoire and technique of its own.
Distinguishing itself as a dance-drama, the Ankiya-nat draws upon distinct technique and repertoire of its own. In technique, it follows the basic technique of classical styles – pure dance (nritta) and abhinaya. Of course, being a dance-drama, natya is its soul. The drama which is known as Ankiya-nat, is One Act Play without having any scene division in it. The theme of the plays are mainly based on Bhagavata purana though sometimes episodes from the two epics i.e. the Ramayana and the Mahabharata are also adopted. The structural format and the dramatic propriety of this drama form are within the compass of Indian dance and dramaturgy. The language used in the text is of two types namely, Brajawali and Sanskrit. Brajawali (not Brajabuli of Bengal) is an artificial language blended with Assamese , Avadhi, Braja etc. To entice and to give aesthetic enjoyment to the people of different stratifications of the society, here, the scenes and sequences are described in four different ways, such as, prose (katha), song (gita), skt. verse (sloka) and panegyric hymn (bhatima). The text is preponderance of songs for which sometimes the critics term this drama form as ‘lyrico-dramatic spectacle’. The songs used in Ankiya-nat are based on the principle of Dhruva songs as expatiated in the Natya Sastra. These songs are set to raga and tala and there are some specifications of certain raga and tala for delineation of particular bhava and rasa. The performance of Ankiya-nat is known an Ankiya-bhaona. The most striking feature of this drama form is that no dramatic personae of Ankiya-bhaona can move without dance, no matter what role he is to play in the drama. The whole performance is interspersed with varied forms of dance numbers which intensify the beauty and emotional content of the drama. Because of such predominance of dance, Sankaradeva himself sometimes calls his plays as ‘nritya’ in place of nata or nataka. In Ankiya-bhaona, the role of Sutradhara is the most remarkable one. He is a key figure of the play who holding a pivotal position conducts the performance, directs the characters, describes the dramatic situations and motivates the rousing of devotional sentiments.
As has been stated earlier, nrittas are overwhelming in Ankiya-bhaona and each and every character of the drama is to dance at least somewhere in the performance. In nritta numbers, right from the footstep upto the movements of various parts of the body, everything is stylized. The use of various patterns of footworks woven with metrical cycles, decorative hand gestures, different stances (sthanas), gaits, spins, elevations, jumps and sitting positions are some characteristic features of nritta technique. The basic stance is called Ora, analogous to mandala-sthana of Indian terminology.
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