Hisory
       Oriental art has drawn people’s attention since the time immemorial. Mysterious, symbolic, it stunned imagination and welded the eye. Veiled under the brightest ever colors, bristling with gilded embellishments, the payal, silvery little bells ringing in pace with the charming movements of her body – that’s how the Hindu woman dancer appears before us. She is not only the joy for the eye; she is also the play of mind, fantasy and imagination. She is the embodiment of thought and sensibility, flame and passion, restfulness and contemplation.
         What are human hands? What are they made for? To take and to put – these are their major elements. But hands-feelings – is something else. What is hand-love, hand-parting, hands-sea, hands-flowers?.. And a glance, following in the wake of the flying off birdlike hand, - is not really the glance of the one who follows – it is her flight. “Where there is a gesture, there is a glance, where there is a glance, there is a thought, where there is a thought, there is a feeling”- this is the golden rule of Natyashastra – the old Hindu treatise on the art of dance. 
          The Hindu dance ensemble Mayuri was started at the Railroad Workers Club in the city of Petrozavodsk in 1987. The ensemble’s head is Vera Ivanovna Evgrafova, the Republic of Karelia’s Honored Worker of Culture. In 1995 the Karelian Culture Ministry awarded the Mayuri ensemble with the honorary title Popular Group. In the ensemble’s repertoire are more than 90 stylistically diverse of India, among them dances from India’s movies.
           In the ensemble’s company are 20 dancers ranging in age from 15 to 25 years. The creative work of the ensemble was highly appraised by India’s art lovers, among them by the Consul General of the Republic of India Mr. Rajagopalan and the Cultural Attache of the Consulate Mr. Ramesh Chandra, due to whose recommendation the Government India granted stipends for the ensemble’s soloist dancers for internship in dance institutions of the city of Delhi.
          The Mayuri ensemble’s soloists Elena Fiskovets and Natalya Fridman have taken a yearly course of tuition with the renowned pedagogues – Saroja Vydyanathan (Bharat-Natyam style) and Pandit Jaikishan Maharaj (Kathak style). In 1998 the ensemble was awarded Grand-Prix and twice Laureate of Russian dance contests in Tikhvin and Tuapse.

 
 



Tikhvin.
Laureate.


 


Tuapse.
Grand-Prix.