This inaugural performance of “Dance India: Choreographing Traditions, ” a four-day Indian dance festival and conference sponsored by the Chicago-based Natya Dance Theatre that features top dancers and troupes from across India, America and Canada, will spotlight such South Indian dance forms as the traditional temple male-female dance known as Koodiattam, rarely performed these days outside of a handful of traditional Indian temples, the Therukoottu, or “street dance” style popular in urban areas where all-male dancers wear towering headdresses, sparkling shoulder plates, wide colorful skirts and elaborate makeup and sing while dancing to convey the mythological world of the great Indian epics and Tamil classics, the high-energy dance set to fast cymbal-laden music known as Ottantullal, and the colorful martial-art forms known as Silambam, or South Indian stick fighting, and Kalari Payat, the oldest Asian martial art that is over three millennia old and which was communicated in secret wherein participants imitate animal movements and energy forms. (Dennis Polkow)
Thu/6:30pm-8pm, Chicago Cultural Center, 78 E. Washington, (312)212-1240.$15-$30.
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