A rare video of festival history has many tales to tell

Actor Vineeth performing Mohiniyattam at the State School Art Festival in 1984. Screen grab from YouTube video.
| Photo Credit: TH

There is a video of a beautiful Mohiniyattam performance from the 1984 State School Arts Festival that has attracted over 2 lakh views on YouTube. The graceful movements and facial expressions of the dancer are a treat to watch. The Swati Tirunal composition,  Dani samajendragamini, is superbly choreographed too.

The performance is a reminder why this classical dance form of Kerala is named so — the dance of the enchantress. The enchantress in the video, though, is a boy. The performer, Vineeth, went on to become one of the finest and most celebrated artistes in the history of the State School Arts Festival. The actor-dancer may be one of the finest male Bharathanatyam dancers now, but the video proves how versatile an artiste he is.

“I wasn’t aware that somebody had shot my performance as only a few owned video cameras those days,” Vineeth tells  The Hindu over phone from his home in Chennai. “It was when one of my friends and schoolmates Lovel, who was a State winner in folk dance, told me about it that I came to know that a man called Melady Raveendran of Vadakara had shot the school festival of that year.”

On social media

Vineeth then got the VHS video remastered and posted it on his social media accounts last year. It should be among the oldest available videos from the school festival. “Some parts of the video were damaged by fungus,” he says. “My performance had a duration of 10 minutes, of which four were lost.”

But the six-minute video shows how good he was at such a young age. “I would give full credit to my guru Kalamandalam Saraswathi who choreographed that piece so beautifully,” he says.

Excellent dancers

“It was a  shringara piece and I just did what she taught me. At the school festival, Mohiniyattam is no longer a competition event for boys. Back in my days I remember there were several excellent Mohiniyattam dancers among boys, like Vineeth Kumar, Deepak Venugopal and Sujith.”