OUR PHILOSOPHY & HISTORY

Our History

Nrtyakala was founded by dancer/choreographer Menaka Thakkar in August 1972, formally incorporated as a not-for-profit organization in June 1981 and received charitable status in July 2010.

As the first school of Indian dance in Canada, Nrytakala has completed four decades of uninterrupted functioning and has grown to be a major Canadian institution where students of diverse cultural backgrounds are trained in the classical and contemporary traditions of Bharatanatyam and Odissi, and nurtured into performers, choreographers and teachers and dance conductors.

Shortly after Ms. Thakkar arrived in Canada, she realized that there was no training or access to Indian dance offered to children and proceeded to teach Bharatanatyam across Canada. In the early years the advanced students constituted a virtual touring unit which involved wide-scale performing interna¬tionally. Students performed with Menaka in Canada, the United-States, India and England as part of the Menaka Thakkar Dance Company and were taken to international conferences to demonstrate along with Menaka’s paper presentations or lectures. (Sweden in 1984, Sydney, Australia in1998, Ottawa in 2001).
 


The school has continually grown over the years both quantitatively and qualitatively and has introduced many innovations. It has produced over 150 graduates, thus creating a significant pool of professional dance artists.The school’s own vision and scope have expanded over the years. Starting with total training programs in classical and neo-classical Bharatanatyam and Odissi, the school has progressively introduced systematic training in movement vocabulary derived from Yoga, Kalaripayattu (Martial art of Kerala), Graham technique, Butoh and Chhau. This, along with training in dance music, nattuvangam (conducting) and rigourous training in classical and neo-classical traditions of Abhinaya (narrative and expressive dance) has been fully integrated in the ten year training program at Nrtyakala. The school has, at present, four studio locations in GTA where the training is imparted: Thornhill, Brampton, Markham, and the studios of the National Ballet School in downtown Toronto. Besides classical Bharatanatyam and Odissi, useful stand-alone courses are also offered from, such as “Bharatanatyam for Ballet and Western contemporary dancers”. The school has always invited eminent gurus from India for short or long periods to teach at advanced levels. They include: Kalanidhi Narayanan, Guru Kittappa Pillai, C.V. Chandrasekhar, Guru Kelucharan and his daughter-in-law Sujata Mohapatra. Many of the graduates have gone on to join the sister institution “Menaka Thakkar Dance Company” and performed professionally, both nationally and internationally.

Although the school is located in Toronto or the GTA area, Menaka’s student body does have a national character. This is because she has taught extensively on intensive periodic visits to other cities such as Winnipeg, Thunder Bay, Saskatoon, Regina, Hamilton, and Ottawa over a number of years and created a whole generation of Indian dancers in Canada. She has thus taken Nrtyakala training to them and presented them in the senior graduation (arangetrams). Many of them have continued to come to her intensive Summer Courses where they join the Toronto students. Our students have won first and second prizes in International Bharatanatyam dance competitions held in New York and one of Menaka’s early students won the Canada Council’s Jacqueline Lemieux Award and now performs professionally in U.S. Two of her early students who danced with the company for several years have now blossomed into leading contemporary dancers and choreographers on the Canadian dance scene; and another working out of San Francisco has been acclaimed for her illustrious performing and teaching career in Odissi. In that vein, Menaka continues to teach Bharatanatyam in periodic workshops at the National Ballet School, Toronto and in dance courses at York University where she is Adjunct Professor of Dance.
 


Our Philosophy

  • Preserving the authenticity of a tradition while recognizing its evolution over time

Our philosophy has been to impart the traditional framework with all respect and rigor and without any compromise, but also to emphasize what Rukmini Devi, the central figure in the process of modern tradition building, pointed out: “Tradition is not something one inherits, but something one labours to repossess differently in every period of history.”

  • Integrative training that equally nurtures physical, emotional, creative and intellectual abilities of a professional dancer

Dance must be appreciated as a strong vehicle of transmitting a whole culture with its distinctive life style, values, world views, social institutions, philosophy and religion. This larger understanding will make the students better dancers in their own style and more innovative creators and choreographers.

  • Combining a modern institutionalized environment of learning with the one-to-one guru-disciple teaching system of Indian tradition

At Nrtyakala, our approach is to integrate the one-on-one Guru-disciple relationship with the demands of institutionalized training that involve uniformity, a certainty of a common curriculum and a fixed amount of time for every student.

  • Performance experience is essential to the full training of a dancer

Nrtyakala students receive an in-depth participation in the entire process of
creating, producing, and performing as an integral part of a professional dancer’s training process.

  • Specialization in Indian dance but with practical exposure to non-Indian dance cultures

Although the goal of our dance school is to produce professional Indian dance artists, we believe it is absolutely essential for our students to become familiar with a wide range of other dance cultures and physical cultures so that they can function in the wider Canadian dance scene with mutuality and sharing, not in isolation of their own culture-specific dance activities.