The spring in her step

She is a dancer and choreographer, a celebrated artiste and a star-performer, and yet she is as chatty as a close friend. When I caught up with Padmashri Geeta Chandran, the famed Bharatanatyam exponent, our conversation was as breezy and easy going.

Belonging to a Tamil brahmin family, Geeta admits that music and dance were always a part of her life. “I woke up listening to classical music played on LP records and when I was five, my mother decided that without dance my education would be incomplete, so I started learning Bharatanatyam under the tutelage of Swarna Saraswathy, and later, under a galaxy of eminent gurus. I must admit that when I was learning the art form, it was always without any stakes and because I enjoyed it.”

After graduating from Lady Shri Ram College, she did her Master’s in Advertising and Public Relations at the Indian Institute of Mass Communication, New Delhi. She even started working in media research, but knew dance was her true calling and decided to pursue her passion as her profession. “When I decided to quit a corporate career for dance, everyone said it was a wrong move. But I could not lead a fragmented life, so I decided to devote more time to dance and started assimilating more from my teachers. It was wonderful that I could learn so many new facets of dance. This gave me a lot of courage to realise that I had indeed taken the right decision.”

As a natural progression, Geeta also started teaching at the young age of 26 alongside her guru. She later started Natya-Vriksha, an organisation devoted to promoting Bharatanatyam. She has evolved a holistic method of teaching the art form, where she trains her students in both dance (theory and practice) and dance aesthetics. “They are also made aware of the related fields of music, costume, stage design, sound and light technologies, which in a way opens up the canvas to a much wider spectrum.”

For someone who believes that dance must be linked to life and that artistes must use their unique position in society to make a difference to lives, Geeta admits that collaborating with other artistes has helped her evolve her own techniques. “My principal at LSR asked me and puppeteer Anuroopa Roy to do a presentation on the theme of ‘Women and War’ and we decided to collaborate to create a dance-puppet presentation based on the Mahabharata, which made me realise that dance can be interpreted with a new verse.”

Geeta further explains the importance of making the art form relevant. “When most of my friends in Delhi failed to understand or engage with my performance at a deeper level, I decided to weave the art form with Hindi poetry and the barrier was broken immediately,” says the author of the book So Many Journeys that chronicles her dance experiences.

Geeta has also choreographed and collaborated with artistes including Shuvaprasanna, Arpana Caur, Paresh Maity, Jayasri Burman, Naresh Kapuria and Arjuna. She has also blended dance with the poetry and writings of Chandra Rajan, Lakshmi Kannan, Ashok Vajpeyi, Ashok Chakradhar and Asha Bage.

A-top graded dancer with Doordarshan and at the Indian Council for Cultural Relations, Geeta has been recipient of both junior and senior research fellowships from the Government of India’s department of culture. “The Lady Shri Ram College Illustrious Alumna Award is close to my heart as being recognised by your alma mater is something special. Of course, the Padmashri left me quite speechless with the ceremony, and for me, it came with a lot of responsibility. It was a humbling experience and I felt that I needed to raise the bar in my performances several notches higher.”

Geeta has travelled all over the world, performing at many prestigious dance festivals in India and abroad. “Amongst one of my most memorable performances was when India turned 50 and I was part of one of the biggest dance concerts. All the big names performed and I felt blessed that I was also part of them. I was actually the youngest performer then and I cherish the poster of that show even today.”

In 2007, Geeta was invited to perform at the World Hindi Conference in New York, and then again to represent India at the India-60 celebrations at the Lincoln Centre in New York. Looking ahead, she says, “I want to be fit and dance till the end. I am also hoping to integrate art in school curriculum. We need to celebrate and take pride in our culture and this must be taught in schools.”

Canadian author Anne Dublin listed Geeta Chandran as one of the 10 global “all time great dancers” in her book entitled Dynamic Women Dancers (Women’s Hall of Fame series). And it’s certainly not hard to see why.