Poem in Motion: A Unique Blend of East and West in Sandhya Raju’s Performance Poetry of Maya Angelou’s Poem ‘Phenomenal Woman’

Dance is an ancient, universal art form that stirs the souls of the performer as well as the admirers. Dance has the power to heal, nourish, teach, and spread joy and peace. In India, a multicultural and multilingual country, innumerable folk, and classical dance forms have flourished and continue to be practised across villages, towns, and cities. Religious festivals, cultural gatherings, social movements, and youth programmes are incomplete without the rhythm and beauty of music and dance. On Feb 2, 2022, the eminent Kuchipudi danseuse Sandhya Raju launched a terpsichorean rendition of the famous poem ‘Phenomenal Woman’ written by the American poet and activist Maya Angelou and published in 1978, as a tribute to the former’s mother on her birthday. Raju, with her co-dancers from the Aayana Dance Company, made a creative interpretation of the poet’s powerful words, while adding a verse of her own which in turn emphasised the concepts of inner strength of a woman and the depth of mother-daughter bonding. The choreography largely borrows from Kuchipudi, a dance form with its origin in an eponymous village in Andhra Pradesh and founded in the classical Sanskrit treatise Natya Sastra. Angelou’s emphatic paean to the confidence and inner beauty of the woman fuses with the Indian performance art form to weave a mesmerising visual-aural experience to the viewer, bringing in an East-West blend that surpasses the boundaries of language, culture, and race.