Staged Inspiration

She walked to the podium with a determined look. She was to perform Bharatanatyam to a packed auditorium. The Tamilatti started dancing to a Kannada song, "Krishna nee begane baro". He smirked at the horrible diction of the Kannada lyrics. Must be a Tamilatti, he thought. As the dance progressed he observed  that there was no synchronization between the song and the dance moves. Though it was a silly song, he felt, at least, it was from a time when both sexes wore similar dresses and adorned themselves with similar jewellery. In present era, only females could dance to this song written in praise of a male god.Or, maybe patriarchy hadn't entered into this art. His train of thoughts were interrupted when the song ended. Soon a Telugu song started playing and the danseuse continued her performance.

He looked around. Some people were nodding and thought smugly that many were watching with dazed attention. All of a sudden, the music stopped. It appeared as if there was a power outage. People started murmuring. The dancer made a hand gesture for people to be seated and resumed her dancing without the music. Now some people started clapping in appreciation. She continued and now started dancing by kneeling and bending close to the ground. He couldn't watch anything as the first two rows were on their feet. This strange spectacle continued for another five minutes. There was a huge applause once the show was over. Then he heard one guy exclaiming,"Wow! I didn't know that this was preplanned. There was no actual power cut. A brilliant lesson on keeping your cool under adverse conditions. Brilliant! Absolutely brilliant!".