Besides the early literature, the visual arts, such as early sculptures, reliefs, and later paintings, also give extremely valuable information about theatre and dance. In India the whole phenomenon of the interrelation of dance and the visual arts, and indeed of other art forms as well, is a most crucial one.<\/p>\n
The question is not merely of borrowing and exchanging materials and ideas from one art form to another. In Indian thought, dance, and all art, is basically a religious sacrifice (yajna)<\/i>. Art is also regarded as a form of yoga and a discipline (sadhana)<\/i>. Through the creation of a work of art the artist\/craftsman strives to evoke a state of pure joy or bliss (ananda)<\/i>.<\/p>\n
The human body was seen as a vehicle of worship and thus performances become acts of invoking the divine. By 200 AD at the latest, as stated above, the complicated techniques of dance-like acting, as well as the rasa<\/i> system, were codified in the Natyashastra<\/i>.<\/p>\n
It is significant that in the Indian tradition it is dance, a temporal and corporal form of art, which is regarded as the ascendant art form. It set the measure for other forms of art, since they adopted the theory rasa<\/i> from the tradition of the Natyashastra<\/i>.<\/p>\nDance and Sculpture<\/h2>\n
Dance has been so predominant in its position that some textual sources stress that sculptors and painters cannot succeed in their work without a basic knowledge of it. The Natyashastra<\/i> sets the physical and dramatic tools for evoking the rasa<\/i> or the emotional state appropriate to worship. On the other hand, the Silpashastras<\/i>, manuals of iconography and sculpture, were intended to help in producing the corresponding figurative representations.<\/p>\n
Consequently, the principles of movement, however complicated they may be, are the same for both a dancer and a sculptor. The final goal of this intricate science of movements, measurements, poses, gestures etc. is to create the rasa<\/i>, the actual object of presentation and, finally, to reach even further in evoking the state in which transcendental bliss can be experienced.<\/p>\n
All the three Indian religions, Hinduism, Buddhism and Jainism, share the same theoretical basis for dance and the visual arts. And so most of the margi<\/i> or \u201cclassical\u201d dance techniques, in spite of their local stylistic variations, bear strong similarities in all of these three traditions. Consequently, their imagery shares common aesthetic norms and iconographic features.<\/p>\nDancing Gods<\/h2>\n
As early as from the Vedic period (1600\u2013550 BC) onwards, Indian literature and mythological narrative created characters which were depicted in the visual arts as dancing or in easily recognisable dance-derived poses, reflecting the prevalent dance techniques.<\/p>\n
During the classical Gupta age from the fourth to the sixth century AD the repertoire of the dance images expanded further, while the Puranas<\/i> or mythological stories of the early centuries AD provided more dance-related imagery. Along with dancing human beings and semi-gods of older periods appeared dancing gods, the first of them being the dancing Shiva.<\/p>\nShiva Nataraja, Shiva as the King of Dance<\/h2>\n\n\t\t