A tribute to the midwife of Indian dance in Canada
TORONTO (Globe and Mail), February 15, 2008:
While some senior citizens delight in slowing down, Menaka Thakkar has no such thought. "I'll retire from dance when I die," declares the celebrated Toronto choreographer, who turned 65 last March.
Her company's entire 2007-08 season is a tribute to her 37 years of performing and teaching classical Indian dance across this country. In Moving to Rhythm, which opens at Premiere Dance Theatre tonight, Thakkar looks to both the future and the past. "I never married and had a family," she says, "so my students are my children. This show is about youth."
Thakkar's new company work is inspired by the circular structure and rhythmic build of Ravel's Bolero. She first heard the famous concert piece when she arrived in Canada in 1972, and her dream of creating a dance in the style of Ravel is finally coming to fruition with a musical score by Montreal's Vasudevan Govindarajan and Toronto's Ron Allen.
Joining Thakkar's company for this show are guest artists who have close associations with her. Toronto's Nova Bhattacharya and San Francisco's Niharika Mohanty, are both acclaimed dancer/choreographers in their own right. To honour their former teacher, the women are performing bharatanatyam and odissi solos respectively. Pavitra Bhatt and Kalishwaran Pillai, two young bharatanatyam male dancers from India, are both guest teachers at Thakkar's school. Pillai is the son of Thakkar's legendary and revered guru, the late "Kalaimamani" Shri T.S. Kadirvelu Pillai.
Bhattacharya was Thakkar's very first Canadian pupil. After seeing a Thakkar solo concert, her parents delivered their 6½-year-old daughter into Thakkar's hands. Says Bhattacharya: "Menaka's story is the reverse of most immigrants who come to Canada to better themselves. Menaka gave up a glittering career in India to better us. She felt sorry for kids like me - the children of immigrants who had no connection with our cultural heritage.
"She's the Celia Franca and Betty Oliphant combined of Indian dance."
Thakkar has always been an iconoclast. When conventional wisdom argued that classical Indian dance was so complex, a dancer should only specialize in one style, Thakkar became a master performer/teacher in three - bharatanatyam, odissi and kuchipudi. "If you can learn many languages and keep them separate," she explains, "I felt you could do the same with dance."
Similarly, she believed that all dance was grounded in anatomy and gravity, and was curious to find commonalities between Indian classical forms and Western ballet and modern dance. "Geography, politics and costuming all affect the evolution of different dance styles, but dance itself is a common language," she says. "I wanted to test my theory - that only training makes western and eastern dance forms develop differently."
Her brother organized a solo concert for Thakkar to introduce bharatanatyam to Canada, and before the evening had ended, she had four invitations to perform and teach across the country. A flood of offers followed. When Thakkar converted her visitor's permit to a work permit, and then kept on requesting extensions of the latter, an enlightened immigration officer (this was the open multicultural Trudeau years) told her to apply for landed-immigrant status because the country could use people like her.
Thakkar opened her school, Nrityakala, The Canadian Academy of Indian Dance, in 1975. Her company was the first Indian classical ensemble to receive Canada Council operating grants. She continues to perform, teach and present papers all over the world.
"To see all these young people performing on stage gives me enormous pleasure and pride because I created them," she says. "The show is about my journey in Canada and the legacy I am creating. I look back over my 65 years and see that my art has been a lifetime gift."
By Paula Citron
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