Chakraborty Saionee-How Sohini Roychowdhury Has Put

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Front Page > t2 > Story IN TODAY'S PAPER Front Page Me gusta Compartir 596 Tweet Nation Calcutta Dance Bengal Foreign - How Sohini Roychowdhury has put Bharatanatyam on the Business world map Sports Saionee Chakraborty Horse Racing She’s a Bharatanatyam exponent who t2 studied at Modern High School for Girls, St. T2 Online Xavier’s College and Cambridge University. Opinion She took Bharatanatyam to Madrid, has worked with Danny Boyle and is quite a SPONSORED “decent” cook. Yes, Sohini Roychowdhury is Property NEW a woman of many parts and yet so rooted. t2 chatted with her at her house near Moulali CITIES & REGIONS ahead of her performance at the 29th Metro Maharashtra State Police Games 2017 in Aurangabad. North Bengal Northeast Dance has always been a part of your Jharkhand life? Bihar Dance was all I did. I started when I was four. Odisha It’s always been Bharatanatyam. I did learn Kathakali and Mohiniyattam from WEEKLY FEATURES Thankamani Kutty, Guru Venkitt and Guru Knowhow Mon Govindan Kutty, but it was more for my repertoire. I took Bharatanatyam classes Salt Lake Fri from Thankamani Kutty and Guru Venkitt. 7days Sun Why Bharatanatyam? LEISURE Sudoku When I was four, I saw Yamini Krishnamurthy Sohini Roychowdhury at her maternal house near dancing. Before that I was a sleepy child Sudoku New Moulali. Black Madhubani sari: Madhura; styling: watching classical performances. When I saw Crossword Aishwarya Biswas. Picture: Pabitra Das her, it was kind of a moment of epiphany. I Jumble was like, this is what I want to learn. I couldn’t Gallery sleep. Something really good stirs you up and creates a passion that storms inside you. I researched who I could learn that style from… ARCHIVES You were just four… Since 1 March, 1999 Yes, I was just four! I wrote ‘Mrs. Kutty’ on a piece of paper and brought it to my father (sitar PRESS RELEASES player Subroto Roy Chowdhury). He took it further and I started learning. In my house, Businesswire India because the classical arts were taken as profession, they were very serious about it. They NewsVoir wouldn’t entertain it as a hobby or a passing fancy. You needed to kind of make it gospel. PR Newswire When did you move to Madrid?

EXTRAS Ten years back. My husband who is a retail banker was asked to go there and set up retail Travel banking. Before Madrid, I was in Romania and Delhi. I left Calcutta in my mid-20s. All this while I was dancing Bharatanatyam and travelling to Europe four-five times a year and to THE TELEGRAPH Australia and New York to dance, but for solo performances. About Us What about Spain excited you? Advertise Feedback Spain excited me very much because I related to the flamenco culture. It’s warm and full of Contact Us sunshine and it has a lot of passion and is close to our Indian rasas. My main motto was to connect civilisations. There is no reason why a Spanish child should not be able to dance Bharatanatyam and an Indian child flamenco!

But they didn’t know about Bharatanatyam. All they knew about India was Bollywood. But they wouldn’t come to learn. They would rather learn belly dance or African tribal dance. I guess I made a difference there. Within two years of a lot of pain and tears, there would be little boys who would give up football to learn Bharatanatyam by choice. There were girls who would force their parents to make them give up ballet and flamenco and take up

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Bharatanatyam. I don’t have a single Indian student.

You started with how many students?

I started with six and by now 2,000 have passed through me. We have a permanent 60 of them who are stage level. We have Spanish, French, Bulgarian and Iraqi students. I have students who are performing on stage, who came to me when they were 52 and they are 60 now.

I think that is a very important part of what we do because it celebrates womanhood. It’s not as if your shelf life ends as soon as you knock 30.... In India we still have 80-year-olds performing on stage. It’s a way of life. I feel some amount of maturity is necessary to project the rasas well. We are not looking at gymnasts.

Sohini with her Sohinimoksha troupe

Tell us about Sohinimoksha...

In Spain, I take classes in Casa Asia (ministry of external affairs) and at Sohinimoksha Centre of Arts. I have a branch in Berlin and I am attached to 10 universities.

I teach my students Bharatanatyam but what I take to the stage is music I partly composed and partly organised with themes and called it the Sohinimoksha dance opera where I integrated Bharatanatyam, flamenco, jazz ballet and other forms, like I’d use African drums to show taandav and Sephardic Jewish flute to show our shringaar. And we suddenly clicked! It is a form of communication.

When I approached the ministry of external affairs in Spain, one particular gentleman told me point-blank, ‘I know about Bollywood. The Bollywood actors take off their shirts. Could you do the same because the middle-aged men would love it?!’ That was so humiliating! I couldn’t dance for two days. The third day I took a piece of Tchaikovsky and was choreographing and dancing. Then I taught my students and put jazz ballet into it. I made a video and sent it out. We had eight offers within 12 days! This is what we want to do. That was the turning point of my life… in 2006.

Then Danny Boyle called us to perform at the premiere of Slumdog Millionaire. He asked me to choreograph for the Oscar premiere. We worked for 14 hours a day with four of my dancers and he loved it. It was a big turning point. He said, you have 11 days. You have to perform to our tracks your way. That took us one level further because every dancer and musician would be dying to work with him.

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And also with Hrithik Roshan?

He performed with me at IIFA. He is brilliant. Natural! He is our current fave!

Did you learn anything else?

I learnt flamenco and contemporary dancing but just for a better understanding. I also learnt and played sitar professionally but then I gave up. I was exposed to Brazilian ballet, Cuban ballet and it got into my system.

What else do you want to learn and attempt?

Koodiyattam fascinates me. It is the most ancient form of Sanskrit theatre. Also Kabuki theatre and Noh opera. I would like to study the ancient scripts written in Sanskrit. We have a dance opera called Maya’s Dream.. .we’d like to do something with it on celluloid.

Which is your fave production from your body of work?

Durga. Mahishasura is not killed because of the quality of mercy. We end with Rumi’s chants of forgiveness.

Relaxes with: Cooking. I make biryani best. Lucknowi style. Stays fit with: Yoga and running one hour every day... 7km. Reads: All kinds of mythology. Gabriel Garcia Marquez, Salman Rushdie, Vikram Seth, Enid Blyton.

High points:

Performing for Danny Boyle. Getting the Mahatma Gandhi Pravasi Samman by the House of Lords. That was the achievers’ award for connecting civilisations and bringing global harmony. Priyadarshini Award in 2015 at the President’s office. Performed for the Queen of Spain (Queen Sofia) twice. Performance in Cabalgata, a hard core Catholic festival in Spain. It was a street parade and we had an audience of 50,000. The whole of Spain watches it. We opened the show.

Favourite performances:

Tchaikovsky’s Swan Lake by the Bolshoi Ballet. Cirque du Soleil who showcase that dance is also about celebrating body aesthetics. Concerts of Yamini Krishnamurthy, Birju Maharaj and Raja and Radha Reddy, which I will resonate with forever.

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