YAMINI KRISHNAMURTHY

Mungara Yamini Krishnamurthy is a renowned Indian dancer of the dancing styles- Kuchipudi and Bharatnatyam. She was born on 20 December 1940, in Madanapalli, Andhra Pradesh; and raised in Chidambaram, Tamil Nadu. She never married.

She made her launch in 1957 in Madras; and became known as the "torch bearer" of Kuchipudi dance. This leading promoter of Kuchipudi and Bharatnatyam offers dance lessons to young dancers at Yamini School of Dance, Hauz-Khas, New Delhi, her own institute. She presented a book "A Passion for Dance", which is her autobiography.

Her career in dancing earned her several awards, some of which are the highest civilian awards of the Indian Republic. These include the Padma Shree, received in 1968; Padma Bhushan, got in 2001; and Padma Vibhushan, won in 2016.

On 8 March 2014, on the occasion of Woman's Day, the Shambhavi School of Dance honored Yamini Krishnamurthy with "Natya Shastra" award at "Nayika-Excellence Personified". There she delivered a lecture on “Contribution of Woman to Kuchipudi".

'The past has been exciting, the present extremely challenging. As for the future, it holds a lot of promise and many surprises. And I cannot wait to unravel them!' is one of her quotes.

She was born in Madanapalli, Chittoor District, Andhra Pradesh. And ws born on a full moon night, and her grandfather named her Yamini Poornatilaka, which meant "a full mark on the brow of night."

Yamini Krishnamurthy was recently awarded the Amaravati Lifetime Achievement Award by Dr. A. Chakrapani on the last day of the two-day festival of Amaravati Nrityotsav 2016. She is a very talented dancer knowing all three dance forms, Bharatanatyam, Kuchipudi and Odissi.

She was interviewed during this ceremony by the reporters, In an interview it was asked for her about the learning period of kuchipudi and Odissi , she replied ‘During my days people had little or no knowledge about Kuchipudi.  Some even regarded Kuchipudi as a folk form of dance. But my father knew better. He had once seen Vedantam Lakshmi Narayana Sastry’s performance and told me that Kuchipudi is a unique and beautiful dance form and that I should learn it. One day this great master of Kuchipudi dance landed in our house along with his disciples’.

He said, ‘I hear you are making a name for yourself for being a good dancer. Why don’t you learn Kuchipudi.’ He taught me Bhama Kalapam. I also learnt from Pasumarthi Venu Gopal Sharma and later from Chinta Krishnamurthy and Vedantam Satyanarayana Sharma’ this was my journey about learning kuchipudi’ And talking about Odissi she said, i learnt Odissi from Pankaj Charan Das and Kelucharan Mohapatra. I used to practise all three styles together all through the day. It was a difficult task as most of the features of these three forms are different from each other. I had a full time job that did not leave me any time for any other pursuit

Content: en.wikipedia.org