KATHAKNATYAM
No. 4, Noida Stadium, First Floor, Noida Indoor Stadium, Gate, Sector 21A, Noida, Uttar Pradesh 201307, India
https://www.kathaknatyam.in/
KATHAKNATYAM is an intimate performing-arts sanctuary tucked along a tree-canopied cul-de-sac in Bengaluru’s Basavanagudi district. From the street you see an unadorned brick arch bearing only a carved pair of “ghungroo-bells” fused with dance anklets; the modest threshold gives no clue to the layered world inside. Beyond the narrow gate, a 60-seat sunken stone amphitheatre spirals downward like a miniature Greek theatre carved from South-Indian granite. Cedarwood rafters hover above, leaving the audience half-outdoors, half-under an open lattice roof where silk banners shift colour as the sun drops. During the monsoon, transparent rain curtains unfurl from the rafters on motorized tracks, turning the amphitheatre into a private storm theatre. The house rules are simple: once the tanpura has been struck, the outside world is asked to fall silent—staff wear silent jute slippers and food service pauses.
At the heart of KATHAKNATYAM stands the bahusruti mantle—a three-tier crystalline sound choke made by Bengaluru acoustic engineers. Micro-perforations in the stage floor mirror the precise 90-centimetre spacing of tabla bols, so every stamp, tap, and bell renders in 3-D clarity no matter where one sits. Musicians say playing here is like standing inside a perfectly tuned tambura itself; the space has hosted experiments in quarter-tone sitar, microtonal saxophone, and the only successful Carnatic-jazz kontakion to date.
The green room, too, is part-performance lab. Mirrors are angled so dancers can watch the tanpura player’s eyebrow inflections while applying eye liner; a “ghungroo bar” invites visiting percussionists to string their own anklets from seven curated alloys traced to archaeological digs in Hampi. Gopika Varma and Gilles Apap have scrawled cheeky graffiti on its black-slate walls, reminders of week-long teaching residencies that feed directly into the repertoire you’ll see on stage.
Programming is purposely “long-tail.” Sundays begin at dawn with nadhaswaram vespers; 11 a.m. brings an abridged Sabha-style kathak demo for schoolchildren that runs parallel to Bharatanatyam geometry workshops on the side terraces. At sunset, banked LED lamps warm from mango to indigo, while the weekly twilight “raga-o-scope” pairs a vocalist, a mridangist, and whichever instrument has just been invented by engineering interns at IISc on Wednesday. Fridays are no-fill lines—90 minutes of pure rasa curated by Praveen D. Rao or Deepti Navaratna, after which chai-sundal is served under umbrella neem trees. First-time visitors often arrive by accident; they leave pledging loyalty oaths handwritten on banana-leaf admission tokens that the staff later dry-press into a living archive behind the foyer.
Check on Google Maps
- Published: August 25, 2025
