|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
Modern Dance MasalaStanford Magazine, January/February 2009
Parijat Desai, '92, began classes in the South Indian dance form bharata natyam when she was 5. “I liked it, but I didn't feel I had any talent,” she says. She also thought her friends would think it was weird, so at age 13 when her family moved to Denver, she took up jazz dance instead. A few years later, when she saw her cousin dancing bharata natyam, “suddenly it hit me that this was an amazing tradition. . . . At the moment I really started enjoying dance, I was experiencing it both as an Indian and as an American. From the moment I felt engaged in dance, there was a question of hybridity and identity.” It seems there could be no other creation story for a dancer/choreographer who blends classical Indian and contemporary Western dance traditions. Desai, who leads a six-member company that bears her name, has received the Lester Horton Dance Award, which honors dancers in Los Angeles, and the Durfee Foundation Artist Fellowship, for which she created a piece with taiko composer Kenny Endo. This winter, she is in residence at Stanford, where she realized she could pursue dance as a profession.
“When I got to Stanford, there was this extraordinary opportunity in the dance department—Katherine Dunham came, and she's a legend in modern dance. She had trained in Western dance and blended that with dances of the Caribbean,” Desai recalls at a café near her home in Brooklyn. Desai, an anthropology major, admired other dancers who combined traditions, too. “There were so many people coming to town, like Urban Bush Women and David Rousseve, and so it was like, 'Hello! You can do this!'” After Stanford, Desai studied ballet, the Horton technique and modern dance, as well as bharata natyam and kuchipudi, and yoga and martial arts. She obtained an MFA in choreography in 1998 at UCLA. In 2000, she began performing with her dancers under a California state arts grant, but the company formed officially in 2005. One of its dancers is the cousin who reignited Desai's interest in bharata natyam, an ancient dance form from southern India. “The music that bharata natyam is danced to involves complex rhythmic structures, and one aspect of the dance is dancing in space to those rhythms, and making sculptural lines with your body as your feet stomp out the rhythm,” she says. A second aspect of the dance is theatrical, involving “facial expression and hand gesture, playing characters and acting narratives.” Her choreography links both of these traditions with modern movement. “How can I overlap the sculptural lines of Indian dance with the dynamic, full-bodied movement of modern dance? How can I use aspects of modern dance theater, which originates in Europe and the U.S., and the [Indian] classical tradition of dance drama?” |
|||||||||||||||||||||||||||
|
||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
