Photos of Day One

These photos were taken on Sunday evening as the formal inauguration of the Natyanjali took place. Natyanjali Trust president advocate Natarajan on stage requested the S C Kuppuswami Dikshitar, a  senior priest at the temple who was a guest on stage to allow the Trust to extend the dance fest by a day.

Natarajan later told us that the requests from dancers to perform here was huge and accommodating them across four evenings was extremely difficult.

Over 250 artistes get featured at the festival here.

On the sidelines, we noticed a couple of armed men in uniform - said to be members of the Rapid Action Force and here to keep an eye since the gathering was large on Sivaratri night. A sniffer dog had done the rounds of the stage area and the fringes of the yard where people sit to watch the dances but the metal detector at the entrance to the yard was just a showpiece later in the evening.

Every dancer gets a small pack of Chidambaram's special prasadam. This year, the hosts arranged for bottles of bhoondi to be given to dance gurus and senior dancers.