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Indian classical dance redefined - Astad Deboo

2014-08-12 1 Dailymotion

Dance Production: STRI PARV as part of Uday Shanker Festival 2006 at Kamani Auditorium, Delhi organised by Sahitya Kala Parishad

Design, Direction & Choreography by Sangeeta Sharma
Dancers -- Sangeeta Sharma, Mahender Rawat, Meeakashi Chopra, Monika Kumari

Founder Director of Anveshana Dance Theatre, Sangeeta Sharma is an Indian dancer and choreographer for over 26 years. She specializes in Indian and Western Contemporary Dance (from ADF, in the USA).

Her theatrical pieces focus on social issues and the internal conflicts of human beings, expressed in a creative and innovative style. She aims to share her own spiritual search with her audience and explores that through a combination of dance and theatre.

The Sangeet Natak Akademi has presented her dance theatre productions. With a strong base in street theatre, Sangeeta has also explored the connection between the performer and the viewer. Some of her thought -provoking productions have been Behati Ganga, on female foeticide, Meri Meera and the Feminine Divine Force. Her latest work ANVEHSN --Deha Praneya is selected for 15 BRM and presented in national & international festivals. Premier of Nagamandala presented by Student Union of NSD in Delhi on 1 Aug 2013 supported by Sahitya Kala Parishad.

Anveshana Dance Theatre is a diverse troupe with an international outlook. Anveshana works as an ensemble and places great emphasis on the personal contributions, individual physicalities and cultural backgrounds of the members involved. It aims to establish a sustained environment for learning and development in all areas of the arts in addition to dance and theatre.

Anveshana creates images and emotions in movement arising from introspection. The idea behind Anveshana is not to approach dance as an illustrative event but rather to arrive at an intimacy with this everyday art. To discover hidden worlds that can spring up inside the same dance.

Astad Deboo is an Indian contemporary and choreographer, who employs his training in Indian classical dance forms of Kathak as well as Kathakali to create a dance form that is unique to him, and become a pioneer of modern dance in India. Through his long and illustrious career, he has worked with various prominent performers such as Pina Bausch, Alison Becker Chase and Pink Floyd, and performed in many parts of the world. He has been awarded the Sangeet Natak Akademi Award in 1996 and Padma Shri in 2007, awarded by the Government of India.

Astad Deboo was born in Navsari, though he grew up in Kolkata till the age of six years. Thereafter the family shifted to Jamshedpur, where father was employed with Tata Steel. His mother was a homemaker, and he has two sisters, sisters Kamal and Gulshan.

At the age of six, he started learning the Kathak dance, from the late Indra Kumar Mohanty and late Prahlad Das. He studied at Loyola School, Jamshedpur, from where he passed out in 1964, after he moved to Mumbai and joined B. com. degree from Podar College, University of Mumbai, here while pursuing his degree he happened to see the contemporary dance of the American Murray Louis Dance Company, this changed the course of his life irrevocably. Shortly after wards, Uttara Asha Coorlawala who was studying dance in New York visited Bombay, and later help Astad get admitted to Martha Graham Center of Contemporary Dance. He left Bombay 1969, on board a cargo boat that set sail from Bombay port, and later hitchhiked his way through Europe to eventually reach New York in 1974.

Over the next decade, he went to attend the London School of Contemporary Dance where he learnt Martha Graham's modern dance technique and learnt José Limón's technique in New York. He also trained with Pina Bausch in the Wuppertal Dance Company, Germany and with Alison Becker Chase of the Pilobolus Dance Company, and travelled through to Europe, Americas, Japan and Indonesia. On his return in 1977, he studied Kathakali, under Guru E. Krishna Panikar, in Thiruvalla, Kerala, where he eventually performed at the famous Guruvayur Temple. All these explorations lead to the creation a dance style unique to him, an amalgamation of Indian classical dance and western group dance techniques.

Source: Wikipedia

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