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Sarayu Sai is a Bharathanatyam Dancer who in the initial years trained in Bharathanatyam by just watching dance performances on the video.When Sarayu Sai started dancing she had a guru, but interestingly enough her Guru dint even know of her existence.
As a three-year old, she lived in Dindigul, a town in Tamil Nadu. There were no dance teachers, but the family had a TV and a Video Cassette Recorder.Sarayu Sai is a Bharathanatyam Dancer who in the initial years trained in Bharathanatyam by just watching dance performances on the video.
When Sarayu Sai started dancing she had a guru, but interestingly enough her Guru dint even know of her existence. As a three-year old, she lived in Dindigul, a town in Tamil Nadu. There were no dance teachers, but the family had a TV and a Video Cassette Recorder. Every time a dance performance appeared on Madras Doordarshan, it was taped so Sarayu could emulate the dancer’s moves & styles.
That apart, Sarayu Sai and her parents would regularly travel down to Chennai during the December season. “I would get so excited seeing the costumes, jewellery and abhinaya” she enthuses. In particular, Smt Chitra Vishweshwaran, Sarayu Sai’s future guru, was the family’s favourite.
A year later, she saw Smt Chitra Vishweshwaran perform on stage when she was four years old and was enthralled ever since. Since her parents were in Dindigul, she religiously taped Smt Chitra Vishweshwaran’s TV performance and imitated them.
This way, she learnt several items from the margam or the repertoire such as varnams, padams & thillana. Eventually, Sarayu Sai and her family realized she would have to learn more to hone her skills. They shifted base to Chennai where Sarayu Sai pursued her dance and higher education. Initially, she learnt from Smt. Radhika Surajit, a practitioner of the kalakshetra style of dance. She advised Sarayu to learn from Smt Chitra Vishweshwaran herself, since she had unwittingly mimicked and learn her school of dance, which is the ‘Vazhuvoor Rammaiyya Pillai” style. And certainly, when Sarayu finally performed in front of Chitra, the guru was amazed. ‘I performed a varnam choreographed by her, which I learnt from a video taped recital, she asked me, ‘From whom did you learn? Did you learn it from one of my students?’ I told her that I had learnt by watching her taped performances.”
