Bala

The highlight of my experience was, of course, the shooting of the musical items. We had decided to include two: a padam to display her mime and her singing, and a varnam to reveal the full range of her dancing. For the first we chose the ineffable Krishnani Begane Baro which I had seen her perform forty years ago, and on every subsequent occasion that she appeared in Calcutta. I had planned to shoot it in a seaside location and had found a beautiful, secluded beach about twenty miles from Madras on the way to Mamallapuram. I felt the open-air setting and the natural light would be a nice contrast to the varnam which I was going to shoot in artificial light in the studio against a black backdrop.
As we arrived on the beach on the day of the shooting (which happened to be our last day in Madras), I found a fairly strong breeze blowing. I asked Bala with some trepidation if this would interfere with her dancing. “Oh no,” she said, “I can manage.” And manage she did. I can think of no other dancer who can use her hand so that it serves the needs of abhinaya one moment, and comes down in a graceful arc the next to restrain a billowing sari.