Dance of the divine

But at 52, the renowned bharatanatyam exponent has little time to dwell on her accolades. She has to present a form that is sometimes misunderstood.

The first thing she wants to clear up is the origin of the dance, which she has studied since age 6. Sure, bharatanatyam emerged from the temples of India, but it is not rarefied. "You have to understand that people did more than worship in the temples -- they got culture there, they studied," she said. "The connection of the dance to the temple is not some exotic thing. It is about the sacred being ordinary. The temple is our bodies. When we dance, we are stirring the divine in us."

Valli hopes to show the divine in the flesh Friday when she performs at St Paul's O'Shaughnessy Auditorium. Part of a 10-city tour, the concert -- in which she will be backed by two vocalists, a violinist and a percussionist -- is under the auspices of Ragamala Music and Dance. Ragamala's founder, Ranee Ramaswamy, and her daughter, Aparna, the premier bharatanatyam exponents in the Upper Midwest, are longtime devotees of Valli. They train regularly with her in India.

"When Aparna started with me, she was around 9," Valli said last week from San Francisco. "She was so attentive and diligent even then that the adults would forget their movements and look to her to know what to do."

Valli also wants to let people know that bharatanatyam is a living, contemporary language.

"You have a vocabulary, a grammar and syntax, and your body becomes the expression of that language," she said. "You use your body to write poetry onstage. That is the essence of it. It is not re-creating movements that you have been taught or have learned, even if you have learned from the greatest masters. It is personal expression built around the true spirit of something original."

In St. Paul, Valli will premiere "Prakriti: Scent of Earth," which uses ancient, medieval and modern poetry to tell a story about the moods and colors of nature during different seasons. In it, Valli evokes the elements -- water, fire, earth and air.

"The piece is a description of nature, yes, but it embodies emotions that we carry," she said. "We begin with devotion, go into love, romantic feeling, then to fear, and splitting thunder, then end with peace."

That Valli has devoted her life to dance came as something of a surprise. She studied English in college and had varied interests that included astrophysics. "Of course, my family at one point wanted me to study law at Oxford," she said. "Dance was not the thing to do if you are from a [certain] part of society."

While bharatanatyam has a long history, it fell into disfavor under British colonial rule of India from 1858 to 1947. During that time, the dancers -- mostly women -- lost the support of temple officials. They were held in low regard -- "just like actors used to be regarded in England at one point during the regency," Valli said -- and often fell prey to the seediest elements of society. Valli sees her work, in part, as a way to right that history, and return the form to its proper place in India and the world.

"A long time ago, to become a dancer you had to learn painting, philosophy, poetry, science -- everything," she said. "It encompasses everything. And it was considered the highest of all offerings to the gods."

A $19 ticket seems like a small tariff to feel like a deity.

Rohan Preston • 612-673-4390