Chennai, Feb. 3: “When will my daughter be on stage?” This is the first question Indian parents living abroad ask when they send their children to a classical dance school, says Deepa Mahadevan, who runs a Bharatnatyam academy in Fremont, California.
Amid the competition and fast-paced life, “there is so much anxiety to achieve things fast that a lot of Indian classical dance in the US is diluted”, says the 28-year-old who is in Chennai for a dance production, Akhanda Margam.
Wherever Indian communities are concentrated, even fledgling schools “can get up to 25 students easily... But somebody has to reaffirm the traditional standards and I want to precisely do that and not let go the standard for commercialisation”, she adds.
Exploring the “beauty and scope” of the 4,000-year-old tradition of Bharatha Muni is the only way to do it, feels Deepa who has an MBA degree from the S.P. Jain Institute of Management in Mumbai.
Akhanda Margam, the production for which she has strained every nerve under her guru in Chennai, Madurai R. Muralidharan, a dancer-composer-cum-choreographer, is a step in that direction.
In a typical Bharatnatyam recital, the numbers are usually set to the rhythmic pattern of the most popular Adi Talam (set to a cycle of eight beats), though there are as many as 35 different talas to which the steps can be set.
In this production, the duo has tried to render all the dance numbers in their recital through the Khanda Jathi Ata Talam, which is set to a tougher cycle of 14 beats. “In recent decades, such an experiment is unprecedented in Indian classical dance,” claims Deepa.
“We now want to take Akhanda Margam to the US in a big way and perform recitals in all the 35 talas available to the artiste within the traditional dance system,” says Deepa, who moved to the US after her marriage.
A winner of the best dancer award from the prestigious Music Academy and the Tamil Isai Sangam in Chennai, Deepa says her mother Savithri Mahadevan, a dancer herself, “put me into dance when I was in the UKG.”
From “my third standard, I started learning dance formally under Mrs Usha Srinivasan, a very dedicated teacher,” says Deepa who has been dancing for 20 years now. Her school in California is called Thiruchittrambalam.
Deepa, who was born in Delhi and went to school in Chennai, graduated in commerce and completed the company secretaryship course before going on to do her MBA. Then she landed a marketing job with Wipro and worked in Chennai and Bangalore. “It was a high-flying job and you get sucked into it. There was no time for dance and I had to quit the job?. Later, my marriage to Karthik took me to the US in 2004,” she says. Her husband works for Cognizant.
“It is my management training that is now pushing me to look for new synergies in dance even while staying rooted in tradition... I want to take our dance beyond Indians,” adds Deepa, whose family shares her enthusiasm. Her role model and “inspiration” is the famous Padma Subramanyam, for exploring new meanings in “natya shastra”.
Deepa is in talks with the Stanford and Berkeley universities. “I am already talking to professors of the performing arts departments to see how we can do cross-cultural experiments.”
