BERHAMPUR: It is the unique prerogative of tigers, whether they prowl the forests or the streets of the Silk City , to instill both awe and fear into those who see them. The sight of a real tiger in the wilderness is rare but no less rewarding is the sight of seven to eight men dressed as tigers, stepping with menacing beauty to drumbeats played on a city street.No dance performed with the lofty aim of appeasing the goddesses can be an easy one and the first ones to attest to that would be the tiger dancers who take the city by storm during the biannual Thakurani Yatra . It is they who paint their bodies ahead of every performance during the festival, it is they who don elaborate decorations in the searing heat and it is also they who raise the dust of the streets when they dance accompanied by the beats of a percussion instrument known as the changu."We don't know since when the tiger dance became such an integral part of the Berhampur Thakuarani Yatra, but we have seen that the number of dancers has only increased in the last few years," said Santosh Kumar Rout, a senior citizen.The idea has always been to appear as furious as a tiger. After an elaborate prayer involving the costume itself, the body of the dancer is painted in yellow and black spots and stripes are drawn all over. A snake is painted on the stomach and dancers also wear tiger's masks and tails and wear shiny ornaments to increase the starkness of their appearance.The dance form is a preternatural call to nature's unforgiving sway over human lives. Earlier, one individual would perform the tiger dance. But in the last several years, groups of people have been putting up these dances. Often, the trainers who choreograph the routines join the performances, blurring the already swimming lines between the audience and the performers."A professional tiger dancer has to maintain a disciplined and yogic life. Only then will the audience love them," said Raj Kumar Behera, a tiger dance trainer.Some of the tiger dancers of the Silk City have also gone onto perform the dance in foreign countries. "Bhagaban Sahu, a folk dance performer in Ganjam is one of them," Behera added.The dance is usually done in fulfillment of a vow. "I perform the tiger dance to appease the goddess as I have a manashika (vow) to perform it so that my troubles will be gone," said B Srinivas Rao , who is also the corporator of the Berhampur Municipal Corporation (BMC).However, for a craft in which the reward is the performance itself, there is little to look forward to for those who practice it. Noted film director Budhadeb Dasgupta had reportedly taken the concept the tiger dance of Berhampur to make his National Award-winning movie Bagh Bahadur."Dasgupta had visited Berhampur to observe the tiger dance during the Thakurani Yatra before he had directed his critically acclaimed film," said Pradeep Mohapatra, a retired lecturer in journalism and mass communication at Berhampur University.In the film, a man is driven to the brink of sanity almost exclusively by the tyranny of the art he practices. "Being a tiger dancer takes practice. We train for a month regularly," said Anand Rao, a dancer.

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