With a Guinness World Record and several national and state awards for Bharatnatyam and Kuchipudi to her credit, Swathi Bharadwaj is instilling the love for the Indian classical dance in her students. A student herself, Swathi will be performing on April 10, 2016 at Hirabai Hall, Bicholim from 10am onwards along with six of her students from the Sri Natya Bhairavi Trust, making this is her 1011th solo performance. “I have trained in Bharatnatyam, Kuchipudi and Mohiniyattam and have been dancing since the age of 4. I have completed the Junior and Senior exam in Bharathanatyam, and am currently pursuing Vidwath and music senior. For the performance in Goa, we will have a Kuchipudi performance with a lamp on my head while balancing on a plate and then a pot,” says Swathi.
The only daughter of M K Prakash who works in the Judicial Department and K R Anitha, a home-maker, she believes that dance is god’s gift to her. “I am the only one in my entire family, paternal and maternal, who is into dancing and my family is very supportive. I just answered my Class XII exams and my teachers and classmates are very cooperative; this encourages me to dance and train students. If I miss my class, my teachers teach me or give me the notes to make up for my missed portion,” says Swathi, a student of Navodaya Pu College, Channarayapatna in Karnataka.
Swathi entered the Guinness World Records as part of the 2,850-member troupe that performed the largest Kuchipudi dance when she was an Std. VIII student. The event was held as part of the second annual International Kuchipudi Convention at the Gachibowli Stadium in Hyderabad. “I was performing at a state programme when I was approached by an organiser to join in the 2850-member team. We had an audition and then we were selected to perform at the event. I was happy to have my name associated with the record,” she says. She just completed a ten-day Bharatnatyam workshop for students of Nritya Mandir in Assam.
This young dancer is now being trained by Bharatnatyam teacher Vidhushi Rekha Jagdish in Bangalore and she is so dedicated to her twice-a-week class that she travels 140 kilometres for it.
Under the banner of Sri Natya Bhyravi Trust, headed by her mother, Anita, Swathi trains and teaches Bharatnatyam to 450 students children, with nearly 200 from rural areas. The classes have six branches and Swathi trains her students from one to three hours; those who cannot afford to pay the fees, are taught free of cost. “I have been teaching since I was in Class VI and it is a great experience as with every year of teaching, my knowledge about the dances also improves.” Interacting with children in the age group of 5-14 years, she takes on the role of an elder sister and friend; but in the class, she is only a teacher. She performed with her 450 students on one stage for the song ‘Hacchevu Kannadada Deepa’ in Hassan in 2014.
When asked about how she danced for two hours and 26 minutes to enter the Guinness World Records as part of the 2,850-member troupe, she replies: “I have been dancing for so long that I can easily cross six hours of dancing without a break. If I want to set a new record, I think I will achieve it for the longest dance routine.”