“Alarmel Valli is a dancer, noted for her ability to turn a traditional grammar into a subtle, deeply internalized, personal dance poetry. Trained in the Pandanallur tradition of dance, she has evolved a distinctive style of ‘movement as pure joy’, classical and yet contemporary, precise and poetic.

Valli has consistently steered clear of facile notions of relevance and topicality. Her dance is uncompromisingly classical, but is, at the same time, an undeniable language of self-expression. It is both a stylised idiom and an idiolect, blurring the boundaries between tradition and the individual talent, inheritance and invention.

Valli does not claim to blaze new trails. She does not pepper her programme notes with fashionable catchwords like ‘innovation’ and ‘experimentation’. And yet, there is nothing static about her approach to her art. This dynamism of approach is evident in the way she infuses the architectural grandeur and symmetry of Bharata Natyam with a lyricism, exuberance and passion that make it not merely visually sumptuous, but exhilaratingly and unmistakably alive. It is obvious to even the lay viewer that this dance is not merely a received grammar. It is a reinvented one.

Poetry is important to Valli’s art. This is evident on many levels. Her approach to sahitya - or the lyrical content of each composition - is marked by a finely honed ability to tune into the silences in a stanza, the blank spaces in a text. This ability to relate to poetry as a complex compound of music and meaning also offers a valuable insight into Valli’s dance. She has often talked of ‘writing’ with her body, ‘speaking’ with her art. There is little doubt that the highly refined instrument of her body, with its delicately-tuned syntax of sinew, speaks a language that is poetic in every sense of the word - elliptical, oblique and richly textured.

But for all its mastery of nuance, Valli’s dance is never esoteric. Its sensuous immediacy, its quicksilver rhythms and its visceral delight in movement, reach out effortlessly across the stage-lights to connect with audiences across the board, from the specialist to the layperson. Her art may invoke the mystical, but it never mystifies. It understands abstraction, but is never abstruse. It is capable of soaring, but it never loses its vital connectedness with the earth.

To watch Valli perform is to remember the essentially artificial nature of the divide between the sacred and the sensual, the playful and the profound. It is to participate in a sophisticated and ancient carnival of the human body as it venerates and challenges, shatters and transcends space and time all at once. This is dance as celebration. As magic. As shared euphoria.”