A Dance of Fire -Bharatanatyam

The watercolor looks all puckery when scanned.

Bharatanatyam is a South Indian classical dance, sometimes likened to the movement of flames.

I stole the basic idea for the outfit and pose from the 1966 Bollywood movie Amrapali (It's an anti-war love story taking place in the time of the Buddha, so the costume is seriously old-school). While the title character is pretty fierce in her ways, she doesn't hold a candle to Azula.


Still, I can see Azula expressing menacing power through Bharatanatyam. It's such an expressive dance.


(Apologies if I got anything wrong with the dance pose/costume/mudras, etc. Disclaimer goes that I'm not Indian and I haven't seriously studied Bharatanatyam)

Part of a series on ATLA elemental-RL dances. See also- Katara dancing Javanese classical. (Plans for- Aang dancing Kathak for Air, and for Earth, either Haru doing a Mongolian or Uyghur classical dance, or Suki dancing Nihon Buyo)