Message from our Artistic Director Menaka Thakkar

 
As the first school of Indian dance in Canada, Nrtyakala has been operating uninterruptedly for close to 40 years. Over these many decades Nrtyakala has become a major Canadian institution, which has now trained several generations of professional dancers.

The primary mandate of the school is to nurture the authentic traditions of classical Bharatanatyam and Odissi, and produce performers, choreographers and teachers who will preserve, propagate and create traditional and contemporary works in Indian dance. Nrtyakala strives to create Indian dance artists who possess a broad range of knowledge across a variety of other dance cultures such as Western Ballet and Modern. This helps our students to function and flourish in the wider Canadian dance scene with mutuality and sharing, not in isolation of their own culture-specific dance activities.

Implicit in this mandate is a wide-ranging program of teaching, presenting student debuts (arangetrams), and further possibilities in performance and touring for advanced students.

The overall teaching includes theory and studio classes where, besides the training in movements, rhythms, expressional and communicative language of dance gestures, several traditional dance works and full repertoires are learned. The student also learns dance aesthetics, history, culture, music and choreography.

If you are considering sending your child to dance lessons, I hope you come to see us at Nrtyakala.

Sincerely,

For information about our studios and registration,
please visit the "Contact Us" page.

We thank our funders for their generous support: