It is hard to pin down the vibrating energy field that is Yana Lewis. Even when she sits down to talk at Active Canvas, the creativity centre where she teaches dance,  she blithely escapes the hoops you  throw to capture her essence.

Her iridescent eyes dart everywhere like butterflies, her hands create new worlds in the air and you feel breathless as if you were watching a ballerina pirouetting on one toe and becoming a blur for a few magical moments.

The last analogy fits in perfectly because she is a ballerina (among many other things) and has been from the time she was ten. That is how young she was when she joined a full-time vocational school in England. “We studied during day and practiced dance at night. Dance has been my life since then,’’ she says.  She always mentions the words, ‘dance’ and ‘life’ in tandem.

Her life is like a ballet piece and has had its transcendent moments when from the blur of movement came the sweet stillness of peace, piercing clarity and perfect harmony between waft of mind and warp of bone and tissue.
She was living the life of a celebrated international dancer, routinely performing all over the world, making television appearances but her inner life felt incomplete. She recalls,”I could not socialise with people in my fraternity.  The world of television is full of false people. Life in England is cold and it was not feeding my soul. Then about twenty years ago, I discovered Yoga and my life changed. There are BKS Iyengar Yoga schools all over the world and they teach an intricate, detailed form of Yoga which attunes you slowly with your spirit. It was a gradual process but the first thing I noticed was that through Yoga, I was meeting people I was comfortable with. As a hyperactive dancer, I wanted to centre myself and Yoga helped me do it. I began to visit the B.K.S Iyengar centre in Pune frequently. And though physically I was in England, mentally I was in India. Once I fell in love with India, I never left! I chose Bangalore to stay because it seemed to have a cosmopolitan air.’’

Sense and spirituality

She has been in India for almost a decade and her life has become richer in ways she never imagined. She says, “I have experienced India and I sense a spirituality and connectedness in the people that is nowhere else. I see slum children playing in mud and laughing and they need nothing. Maybe they don’t know what is out there to need but still they offer a contrast to kids with giant candy bars abroad and feeling deprived because someone has a bigger bar. I can’t live anywhere else now and even when I go to England, I start feeling restless to come back. It is disorientating to go to a super market and see six aisles full of washing powder in different shapes and sizes. Why do we need so much washing powder? It just goes to show how consumerism and greed have eaten away at our peace of mind. But things are changing in India as well.'' From the time she began teaching ballet to kids, they too have become ‘needier and greedier’.”

Her life is however about ‘giving myself away’. She wakes up at three in the morning, practices yoga for three hours, her dance regimen for two hours and spends almost all her waking hours teaching Yoga or ballet to students. There are also the corporate shows and performances she does with her troupe. 

It is incidental that she is a member of the Imperial Society of Teachers of Dancing and has now been teaching students from all over the world for more than 27 years. It is however intention that is guiding her today to organise dance workshops in orphanages and slums to help kids take to dancing as a ‘form of self-expression and energy release.’  She says, “Once in India, I realised that western dancing is misunderstood here. Western dancing here is associated with Shiamak Dawar. People don’t realise that classical training comes from the ballet. You have to train every day to understand its discipline. It is pure, not vulgar. Bollywood dancing is not western dancing. I cannot bear to watch songs  where bodies without a muscle in them are imitating dance moves from Western videos and gyrating. A child’s bones do not harden completely till the age of eight and they have little muscle control.  It frightens me to see children being taught moves  their bodies are not ready for.  The problem in India is that there is no governing body to say that you cannot teach without proper training.’’

Sharing life

Five years ago, the last piece missing in her life fell into place. She met the man she had never expected to meet. Today she is married to him but won’t share much expect that, “I was content with my life and never expected to marry but then something unexpected happened. Yes, he is an Indian and no, I won’t tell you his name or you will refer to him as Yana’s husband. There is more to him than that.’’
Just as there is more to Yana Lewis than her ability to defy gravity and become a weightless feather, free-floating through the world.