When we dance, the body movement relieves a signal to the brain. With its power of narrative gestural vocabulary through hand gestures or ‘hasta mudra,’ Indian ‘Kathak’ dance has a lot of opportunities to communicate a message or make conversation with the audience. That being said, this dance explores many options to overcome the barrier of language among people or even communicate with a person with hearing disability. According to research, communication through hand movement, along with lips, occupy roughly 60% of the motor cortex of our brain.
Paramita Bhattacharyya, the Kathak dance educator from Los Angeles, with her extraordinary artistic and dance teaching ability, has initiated her own venture to research and educate people about the power of ‘hasta mudra’ of Kathak dance for enhancing communication in various areas of life. She received her training in ‘Kathak’ from renowned teachers and ‘gurus,’ including the legendary Kathak maestro Pt. Birju Maharaj. During her training and practice of more than two decades, Paramita has mastered the technique and now wants to spread the benefit to the people in society.
Mainly focusing on increasing mindfulness and mental awareness among people, especially in children, improving mental health, and enhancing the quality of intellectual thinking, Paramita is determined to design an effective course curriculum for children and for the people of any community who would find great benefit with the use of ‘hasta mudra’ technique of ‘Kathak.’
In recent years, emotion or affect recognition is gaining popularity because it is applied in psychology, cognitive science, and human-computer interaction. In mental interaction or in terms of psychology, affect recognition refers to a nonverbal expression that includes face, postural, and gestural movements displayed by a person or the sender to the audience or the receiver. With the ability of mudra and gestures in Kathak dance, a story is well narrated, and emotion is expressed.
Paramita, with her ‘Talking to the Brain Through Dance’ initiative, is using the technique uniquely to establish communication with non-verbal expression. She is planning to expand her work in the field to help people in need of this kind of approach. She is also going to contribute to the research studies related to this field of affect recognition that use a multi-modal approach to recognize emotion and handle depression and anxiety. One of the very few in this field of research, she will prove to be an expert in the niche and benefit society in the future.
With this mission in mind, Paramita is in the process of initiating her own organization where she would be able to work on her unique teaching technique using ‘hasta mudra.’
Paramita was recently invited by the National Dance Education Organization (NDEO) to present her unique dance teaching technique in a webinar for the audience. The webinar was titled ‘Talking to The Brain Through Dance: Indian Dance Mudras or Hand Gestures Explained.’
Paramita believes this kind of webinar is just the beginning of her work using ‘hasta mudra’ or ‘hand gestures’ to teach the art of dance scientifically and apply dance in therapeutic use to improve brain function.
Beyond imagination, there are many possibilities other than dance therapy to explore when it comes to benefit society. Paramita is excited to share her thoughts regarding these possibilities and mentions, “I teach my audience that hand and body gestures in Kathak dance are geometrically aligned, and different mathematical and geometrical structures are easy to explain through various dance gestures that may possibly make the learning of mathematics more interesting.” Paramita, being a member of the American Dance Therapy Association (ADTA), wants to incorporate the technique in many difficult areas of therapy through dance and also in educational institutions to make learning fun-filled, interesting, and useful.
The webinar is found here to watch on-demand:
