Ashwini Bhatt is a Bharatanatyam dancer currently working with Padmini Chettur in Chennai. She also works with children and is interested in music and literature.
If we think of craft as skill and dance also as perfection of skill and both steeped in traditional knowledge systems Ashwini is rather concerned with the resistance amongst many practitioners and also consumers of dance to any form of change or experimentation and also the rather disturbing form of commercialisation being adopted for the knowledge to survive. Craft too suffers from this. Ashwini has written a personal piece for our July issue exploring these murky depths.