Madhurima Class 9 Chapter 13, Dance Choreography, compares choreography to a river directed around rocks: the art of arranging movements, positions, directions and pauses into a pattern.
What Madhurima Chapter 13 Covers
What choreography is: the art of creating and arranging dance movements into a visual pattern, deciding where dancers stand, which way they face, and when they pause and move. In Indian dance the term is nṛitya-saṁrachanā.
Bharata’s Piṇḍībandhas: more than 2,000 years ago the Nāṭyaśhāstra described group formations of clustering, weaving and linking. Group shapes, travelling patterns and movement in unison or opposition still appear in choreography today.
Parts of a choreography: concept, movement vocabulary, style, space, time (rhythm, tempo and pauses), choreographic tools (repetition, contrast, canon, unison, mirroring, props), and practice and refinement. Folk patterns come from daily life and nature, such as the Bagurumba butterfly dance of Assam and human pyramids in Mallakhamba and Karagāṭṭam.
Nava Nritya: Manjushree Chaki Sarkar, trained in Kolkata and exposed to modern dance in the USA, built a contemporary vocabulary rooted in Indian aesthetics with her daughter Ranjabati. She received the Sangeet Natak Akademi award in 1994.
Mapping the stage: stage divisions run from upstage to downstage and stage left to right, and the chapter also shows the old compass directions with performers facing east. Activities include plotting formations, turning a solo phrase into a group piece, and reviewing it through self, peer and expert feedback.
Exercises in Chapter 13
- Tabulate visual patterns from daily life with the dance forms that echo them.
- Draw a choreography map with stage settings or the placement of dancers.
- Analyse your own choreography in your dance journal.
- Name dance forms where you can see geometric shapes (rekhā).
Read Madhurima Class 9 Chapter 13 Online
More Chapters
- Previous: Chapter 12: Cultural Connections Through Dance
- Next: Chapter 14: Exploring the Fundamentals of Visual Arts
- All Art chapters and the other Class 9 books: Class 9 NCERT books 2026-27
FAQ
What are Piṇḍībandhas?
Group dance formations described by Bharata in the Nāṭyaśhāstra, built from clustering, weaving, linking and moving in coordinated shapes.
What is Nava Nritya?
A contemporary Indian dance vocabulary created by Manjushree Chaki Sarkar and her daughter Ranjabati, rooted in Indian aesthetics.