“When I dance, I feel like I’m not in this world, that I have created my own platform between the sky and the earth,” says Tanushree Sarkar. Her specialty is kathak dance, whose “brisk foot movements” are what first attracted her. Sarkar’s mother–herself a dancer, but not of kathak–began her daughter’s training very young. “I started so small, I don’t remember what age I was.” But Sarkar definitely knows to whom she owes her technique: her “guru,” Pandit Durgallal. He died last February in India after a four-hour dance recital before a stadium audience of 25,000. With the applause still hanging in the air and the musicians waiting onstage, everyone wondered why he wasn’t returning for another bow. He was found dead in his dressing room.
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Trying to explain what she does in Western terms, Sarkar says, “Kathak comes the closest to tap dance; it’s precise in terms of rhythmic patterns. But you dance barefoot, flat and with the heel, not the toe. Only rarely the toe. There’s some spinning, but the hand gestures are more important. There is much more footwork involved in kathak than in the other forms of classical Indian dance, which is why I chose it over the others.
Kathak can be a strain on the more mundane physical level: the ankle bracelets that are part of the traditional costume are extremely heavy, loaded down with 250 brass bells each. Sarkar has something positive to say even about this: heavy weights on the ankles are medically sound, according to the orthopedic authorities she’s consulted, and in fact are prescribed when folks have knee problems.
