Viji turned to her mother and said “I must dance”. At age four, sitting on her mother’s lap on a rickety chair in a dusty auditorium, she watched her cousin performing Bharatanatyam on stage. Viji was born in Mumbai, in a family deeply committed to the arts. Kalyanasundaram of the Sri Raja Rajeswari Bharata Natya Kala Mandir, Mumbai. Her Shakti School of Bharata Natyam in Los Angeles offers meticulous and rigorous training that was instilled in her by the grand masters of the Tanjavur tradition of Bharatanatyam-gurus T.K. She honours the traditional repertoire while extending the technique to connect her rich and intense style with a sharp contemporariness. Viji Prakash is a senior dancer, choreographer, and teacher of Bharatanatyam in the U.S.A.
Musicians and dancers have played the role of ambassadors of Indian culture in the country where they have settled down. The Indian diaspora today constitutes an important, and in some respects unique, force in world culture. As seeds scattered by the winds bloom after the rains, many of these teachers rose to the occasion and their dance schools took hold, flourished and now sway gently as flowers in the breeze.įrom New York, Boston and Philadelphia to San Francisco and Los Angeles, and from Chicago to Austin, there are strong schools of dance and a variety of dancers who have changed with the landscape. There were now in the new land, established teachers in many of the urban centres. With each successive wave of immigration that followed, the children of the Indian diaspora swelled the classes. Teaching dance to young students allowed for flexible schedules. The growing interest in India and its traditions created a few hard w on opportunities in museums and in universities. With their passion for the art form, they set about sharing their art with anyone who had an interest. They found themselves in large cities and in university towns. They came to join their husbands and to start their families.
Some of these brides were trained dancers who came to the US, not as professional dancers, but as young homemakers. Young men-scientists, researchers, engineers and doctors-were making their way to these shores from India and their brides followed. Those were the days before the computer revolution and Y2K.
Young Indian families were coming to the United States. While these dramatic events played out on the national stage, there was another quiet movement underway. Sitar maestro Ravi Shankar thrust Indian classical music onto the international stage with, among other things, his performance at the Woodstock Festival. It was the year of Woodstock the war in Vietnam was raging and the peace movement was challenging social and political norms. Some Pioneers in Bharatanatyam Sruti | June 2019