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Sasikala Penumarthi and students bring Annamayya’s poetry to life through Kuchipudi dance at Emory

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Cover photo: ‘Songs of Praise’, from left to right: Anoosha Kumar, Sasikala Penumarthi, Reneeta Basu.

Atlanta, GA, October 8, 2024: On September 21, 2024, the Performing Arts Studio at Emory University came alive with the songs of 15th-century Telugu poet Annamayya. Led by Sasikala Penumarthi, Executive Director of the Academy of Kuchipudi Dance, along with her senior students Reneeta Basu and Anoosha Kumar, the performance offered a unique blend of music, poetry, and dance. This event featured sankirtanas (“songs of praise”) composed by Annamayya, choreographed in the style of Kuchipudi dance and accompanied by a talented seven-member live orchestra.

To enhance the audience’s understanding of the poetry, line-by-line literal translations of the sankirtanas were projected on a screen above the dancers. This thoughtful inclusion provided a valuable experience for both non-Telugu and Telugu speakers. Many audience members, familiar with some of the songs, noted that they were able to appreciate them in a new light thanks to the translations. Another distinctive aspect of this performance was its focus on a single poet, showcasing Annamayya’s wide-ranging poetic imagination—from his direct praise of the deity Vishnu and his incarnations (adhyatma songs) to songs performed in the female voices of the goddess Alamelumanga (Venkateshwara’s consort) and her friends (shringara sankirtanas).

Sasikala Penumarthi and her students performed seven sankirtanas, choreographed either by Penumarthi or her guru, Dr. Vempati Chinna Satyam. The repertoire included popular pieces such as “Muddugare Yashoda” (“He’s the pearl before his loving mother Yashoda”) and “Paluku Tennela Talli” (“Goddess who speaks sweetly is sleeping”). The performance culminated with the powerful “Brahmamokkate” (“All are one before God”). The translations displayed above the dancers highlighted the repetition of certain lines, while the dancers’ movements elaborated on the narratives and imagery, demonstrating that dance is not merely a reflection of poetry but an elaboration and intensification of narrative, image, and emotion.

The performance also featured an exemplary seven-member live Carnatic orchestra, which included Sastry Bhagavatula on nattuvangam, Subhashini Krishnamurthy as vocalist, Santosh Chandru on mridangam, Anjaneya Sastry on tabla, Lakshminarayana Pisupati on violin, Sai Kishore Ravisankar on flute, and Pallavi Dokka on veena. The full program and biographies of the dancers and musicians can be found on the Telugu Studies website: Emory Telugu Studies.

Promotional flyer for “Songs of Praise,” showing painting and sculpture of Annamayya and Sasikala Penumarthi.

The performance was further enriched by a brief introductory talk by Dr. Harshita Mruthinti Kamath, Associate Professor of Middle Eastern and South Asian Studies, who is currently writing a book on Annamayya and his sankirtanas. Many Telugu speakers have grown up hearing Annamayya’s songs on the radio, television, and in various vocal and dance performances. His songs are still broadcast at the Tirumala Venkateshwara temple near Tirupati, Andhra Pradesh. It is said that Annamayya composed one new sankirtana every day for the god, totaling over 32,000 songs according to the hagiography written by his grandson. Annamayya’s son initiated the monumental task of having approximately 13,000 of his father’s sankirtanas engraved on copper plates, which were stored next to the temple’s inner sanctum. Today, around 2,700 copper plates are housed in the Sri Venkateshwara Museum. Dr. Kamath emphasized how unusual this extensive archive is for a single pre-modern poet, highlighting Annamayya’s powerful and lasting influence on the landscape of Tirumala and South India.

For audience members who had never heard of Annamayya and for those who found themselves singing along or nodding their heads in recognition, the evening offered rich gifts of poetry, song, and dance, as well as motivation to further explore the sankirtanas of Annamayya’s extensive and creative repertoire composed for Tirumala’s God on the Hill, Venkateshwara.

The performance was organized by Telugu Studies at Emory and Asian Arts at Emory, with support from the Academy of Kuchipudi Dance, the Georgia Council for the Arts, and Emory’s Departments of Middle Eastern and South Asian Studies and Religion, the David Goldwasser Series in Religion and the Arts, the Dance Program, the Initiative for Arts and Humanistic Inquiry, the Fox Center for Humanistic Inquiry, and Emory’s student organizations, including the Hindu Students Association and Swara.

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