Beyond the Indian subcontinent Kapila Vatsyayan has become a legend. Although far from the center of the great Indian tradition, Southeast Asian dance scholars emulate Vatsyayan's work and have attempted similar studies of the classical dances within the Indie tradition in Thailand, Myanmar, Laos, Cambodia, Malaysia, and Indonesia. Many of us in Southeast Asia only hope that we can measure up to the strength of her scholarship. For us, the notion of the “great” and “small” traditions is both real and overwhelming.

Thirty years ago scholarship in Asian dance attained new heights with the publication of Vatsyayan's celebrated Classical Indian Dance in Literature and the Arts, the first exploration by an indigenous scholar of the relationship between classical Indian dance, literature, and sculpture. In particular, Vatsyayan opened new frontiers in the understanding of rasa theory beyond its convention as mood and evocation. She explicated the notion of rasa as a state of being and aesthetic theories of dance along with the study of literature, sculpture, painting, music and theater. Her work demonstrated an implicit understanding of performance theory and of deconstruction and reconstruction processes, by which I essentially mean emic attempts to construe or interpret dance. Deconstruction involves the dismantling of a dance form, genre, or repertory into the smallest units of contrasted movements recognized by people of a given dance tradition, while reconstruction refers to the ways these movements are structured within a larger movement system (1).