V. Radhika

Hiroshi Miyamoto still vividly recalls the opposing feelings after his first Bharatanatyam class: being awash in pain but experiencing an inner calm.

Weeks before his debut, hour-long Bharatanatyam solo performance this spring, Miyamoto mulled over a cup of green tea about shoring up his stamina. "Once my stamina drops, my concentration wavers. I have to work on it," says the soft-spoken professional dancer and yoga teacher who abandoned a promising law career in Japan to pursue his passion in Canada in 1994.

While grappling with English, he trained in classical ballet for a year and then moved to contemporary dance, settling on the latter. He perhaps would have remained there, had the founder and artistic director of Toronto-based South Asian dance company InDance, Hari Krishnan, not made him an offer in 2003.

Krishnan, a Bharatanatyam teacher, performer and researcher, wanted Miyamoto in his contemporary dance piece based on Bharatanatyam. Miyamoto's acceptance signalled the beginning of his Indian dance odyssey. He started practising in his apartment, but complaints from neighbours forced a move to a friend's basement unit.

That was five years ago, but the practice routine continues. "Bharatanatyam for me is spiritual. And it also takes me to a different level as an artist," says Miyamoto who treats every rehearsal as a "lesson." In addition to the daily practice, he rents a studio a couple of times a week.

"His soul is very much South Asian," Krishnan says of Miyamoto.

Miyamoto is one of a growing number of non- South Asians in the GTA who have figuratively and literally crossed borders to pursue classical South Asian arts as a vocation, far from the examples of the 1970s, when the West courted the mystic, exotic east, with the Beatles leading the pack.

As a result, the brown artscape is increasingly becoming multi-hued, be it in dance, music or theatre. While mainstream Kathak, Bharatanatyam and Odisi continue to be a huge draw, and the sitar and tabla hold sway on the music front, a significant few have pursued art forms unfamiliar to many desis themselves.

More than a decade ago, contemporary dancer and York University theatre graduate Brandy Leary packed her bags for a planned six-month trip to India to pursue training in Kathak. But one lesson in Chhou, a dance form based on martial arts, changed the then 20-year-old's course. Leary moved to Seraikella, a remote Indian village, where she stayed in a house without running water and electricity, and spent many rigorous hours each day learning Chhou from one of its legends, Kedar Nath Sahoo. The intended six-month sojourn lasted two years.

Now the director of the Anandam performance group in Toronto, Leary reflexively reaches toward her ears (a typical reverential gesture toward the guru) every time she mentions his name. She even chose the name of her company because the objective of art, as her guru explained, is to achieve anandam (blissful ecstasy).

South Asian dances are so alluring, she says, because "they are vibrant, related to nature and female-centric in a nice way that Western dance was not."

The prominence of Durga's picture in Leary's studio apartment, as well as her choice of dances, reflects that the symbol of shakti struck a deeper chord with her than the lovely nayikas of mainstream dance forms. The vivacious dancer thinks abhinaya and mudras - the core of traditional dances - are beautiful, but prefers Chhou's angika abhinaya "that tells stories with the whole body and how all limbs make an emotion or a character. It created a lot more depth in how I work with choreography."

A similar story unfolded in the late '70s, when Joanna de Souza, a 21-year-old Canadian, extended her six-month vacation in San Fransisco to nine years. De Souza, who would later initiate Leary and other Torontonians into Kathak, did not know about the dance or its Indian origins when she first saw a performance. "The dancers were white and so were the musicians," she recalls. De Souza found out where the dancers trained, and the next day she became Chitresh Das's student at California's Ali Akbar College of Music.

Within a year, she was dancing eight hours a day, seven days a week. She married her teacher's brother, Ritesh, a tabla player, and they spent two years in India, during which she earned her master's in dance, before moving to Toronto. Here, Das gave tabla lessons and de Souza started teaching Kathak at the University of Toronto in 1988.

That same year de Souza founded her own dance company, M-DO, a Tibetan word for meeting point. "Like the city of Toronto, M-DO is a place where cultures come together, tradition is honoured and new creative ideas are born," she says.

De Souza's classes begin with a pranam and shloka recitation. Her classes represent the city's microcosm and nationality wins no concessions, just as when de Souza was training. "My guru was tough and continues to be tough," she says. "He said, ‘You (non-desis) start way below zero in people's eyes, and my job is to ensure that technically you are as perfect as possible and that you have a rounded education in culture."

Sally Jones was researching theatre at U of T when she first met de Souza and became one of her students. At her very first Kathak lesson, Jones says she "was sold." It marked the beginning of a relationship with Kathak, India, and Indian music and theatre that is still going strong. Dance took her to India, where the initial skepticism of Delhi's Kathak Kendra teachers wilted in the face of her determination. Jones has been training with Guru Munna Das for many years now.

However, theatre was her vocation and she was interested to see how forms of classical dance are used in dance dramas. So, she travelled, weaving research work with intense dance lessons. On one such trip, in 1997, she documented one of the few remaining itinerant storytellers, or kathavachans, of Uttar Pradesh. Her first foray into directing Indian plays was Karnad's Naga-Mandala at Toronto's Tarragon Theatre in 1997. At the time, contemporary Indian theatre was not on the radar of the public (including desi) consciousness, she says, and she decided to start Rasik Arts, a theatre company to showcase South Asian works.

"I was amazed by the fact that people did not think there was theatre in India, they thought it was classical dance and music," she says.

Rasik Arts has staged the Dora Award-winning Umrao, adapted from the legendary novel Umrao Jaan Ada about a 19th-century courtesan. Ek Katra Khoon, Tara and The Waiting Room followed, and Jones is currently writing a play tentatively titled Finding Tagore that she hopes to stage next year.

Desi theatre is bound by funding constraints, but Jones says she would not trade it for more lucrative mainstream theatre. "Mainstream theatre can be pretty boring, and I think this is interesting and deserves to be heard." So she perseveres, even if Rasik Arts leaves her with little time or resources to pursue anything else - including Kathak.

For many South Asians, the myriad art forms are often a means to explore their cultural heritage. For non-desis, it is purely a pursuit of an art form. Non-desi artists maintain they bring a different perspective and sensibility without diluting the form. "When I do contemporary choreography, I don't venture far out of Kathak vocabulary, but definitely have a Western perspective," de Souza says.

Today, artists cross borders as effortlessly as art. Especially in a diverse city like Toronto, where all one has to do is to step out of the door and embark on a cultural voyage.

V. Radhika is a Toronto-based freelance journalist. Email desilife@thestar.ca

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