Hello I’m Aishi, a physics graduate student at UIUC. In every encounter or introduction, I kind of define myself by my place in this venn diagram:
Figure 1: diagram I think its pretty clear
And as a 22 year old, I find myself on the “conscious incompetence” part of the competence graph (Figure 2) of literally everything in my life right now. Any amount of confidence I had as a dancer and a student of physics at around high school and beginning of college has since been on a sharp decline.
Figure 2: The 4 stages of competence, graphed presumably with the y-axis being “perceived competence” or “happiness”
Which I am not complaining about because, thanks to the advent of video and digital storage, I know I’m a lot better at both dance and physics now, even if it doesn’t feel like it.
To be honest, if it wasn’t for my parents encouraging me to go through with the Arangetram, I would have continued to remain at the unconscious incompetence stage. It truly is a blessing for me to have gone through that rigorous training last winter….if you ignore the raging body dysmorphia that followed shortly after (I’m over it now dw). But since then, I have continued my practice, and come across a valuable lesson that has helped keep me motivated with being a student in academia.
Figure 3: Cats are a case of unconscious competence.
In both dance and song, you’ll find that practitioners of every art form will have different ways of breaking down performances. For example, in music people talk about “bridge”, “chorus”, “verse”, “note”, “beat”, “bar”, etc. In Western dance, a “choreography” is made of many “phrases”, and phrases are made of “8-counts” and these counts have “steps”, and so forth.
In Bharatanatyam, we have a similar structure that is akin to linguistic syntax. I’ll bullet point these core components going from narrow to broad: