A Bharatanatyam recital is built as a journey through the margam, the path, and its stations balance the dance's two registers. Nritta is pure dance: rhythm made visible in struck feet, held geometry and the sculptural bends of the body, without any story to tell. Abhinaya is the other register, the enacted poem, in which the dancer, nearly still by comparison, unfolds a lyric line by line through a codified vocabulary of hand gestures, the hastas, and through the face. The margam classically opens with alarippu, a short unfolding of pure rhythm offered as invocation, moves through jatiswaram and sabdam, and reaches its centre in the varnam, the long composition in which nritta and abhinaya alternate at full depth. After the varnam come the padams and javalis, slow love poems in which the beloved is a god, Krishna above all, and the recital closes with the fast, bright tillana. A vocalist, a nattuvanar keeping the rhythm with small cymbals, a mridangam drummer and usually a violinist accompany the dancer.
The repertoire's devotion is concrete rather than general: Nataraja, the dancing Shiva of Chidambaram, Murugan of the Tamil hills, Krishna the absent lover. The erotic longing of the padams is read inside the tradition as sringara bhakti, desire as the figure of the soul's want of God, which is why the same poem can be danced in a temple festival and on a concert stage.