Esha enters her first Bharatanatyam class hoping to wear a costume and perform on stage very soon or make a video for YouTube like her friend. She has been watching her sister dance and wishes to ...

Juggling three daily jobs for a steady income, 50-year-old Mariamal shows no hint of fatigue as dancing makes her feel alive, she says. When she was 13, Mariamal dreamed of learning Bharatanatyam.

A 32-year-old Chennai-based Bharatanatyam teacher Chezhiyal Neelakesi, brings the dance form to the underprivileged communities in India’s largest resettlement site of Kannagi Nagar. The divides of ...

The floors shine in Sairam’s St. Paul dance studio. In order to reach it, she has to descend a narrow stairway into a brightly-painted basement. It’s perfect studio space, Sairam said. She and her ...

Bharatanatyam’s survival was never guaranteed. We trace how social stigma, reform movements, and cultural politics pushed the ...

When he mixed hot tar for a highway project in the 1980s in Kuala Lumpur, he thought of various mudras. When he collected latex from rubber trees, he dreamed of becoming a dancer. For this young ...

The life of a teenager, especially a closeted one, is filled with confusion – dance was one thing that always made sense. "Every little brown girl does at least a bit of traditional dancing," I say to ...

Step into the rich world of Indian classical dance with our Intro to Bharatanatyam class, led by the talented Shivani Joshi. This session offers a beautiful introduction to Bharatanatyam, one of India ...