Menaka Thakkar Reflects on her 70 Years and her 40 Years in Canada
Menaka Thakkar will celebrate her 70th birthday and 40-year-anniversary of her dance school Nrtyakala at "In the Further Soil" Nov. 12th & 13th at the Harboufront Fleck Dance Theatre.
Contributed by dance icon Menaka Thakkar.
I am truly happy and grateful to be celebrating the twin anniversaries of 40 years of my dance school, Nrtyakala, and 70 years of my own life.
The celebrations which mark the end of a period in your life inevitably make you look back and ask: Where did it all begin? How far back shall I look? To the time I landed in Canada in 1972 and started performing and teaching here? Or to my own ‘arangetram’ (dance graduation) 50 years ago in Bombay, after which my career as a professional dancer began? Or farther still, to my first faltering dance steps 67 years ago in 1945 under the watchful eyes of my older sister Sudha who took my dance training into her hands when I was just three, and then over the next few years made me dance abundantly in her own productions long before my graduation in 1962.
At celebrations like these, you invariably go back to your old albums and look at all those faded pictures and read all those reviews on paper that has turned sepia with time. The past that had dimmed in your memory suddenly uncoils and comes to life and what seemed to have happened a lifetime ago suddenly begins to torment or exhilarate you with a sense of immediacy. But you also realize how far you've come; how much you have changed, and what roads have been walked upon. The journey from Bombay to Toronto has not been over a few thousand miles; in some ways it has been over a few incarnations, all connected in a continuum of memory and a widening inner world of understanding. Of course there are other threads too which hold these years together: struggles, frustrations, achievements, ‘doing without’, hopes, aspirations, joys and sorrows, but finally acceptance of what life has to offer.
And it does offer unsuspected richness; but how differently from the dreams and visions of our youth! But then, you also ask: Is it the same 'you' who had dreamt all those dreams? Indeed, there are some fixed points of reference in this journey of the inner ‘you’ which survive through all the upheavals. As I look back over my own journey and try to trace the roots of that central ‘me’, I find it is ‘dance’. This has been the central fixed point that has never wavered. Even when I was three, I knew I was going to be a dancer. My role model was my older sister Sudha who, as my mentor, was equally convinced of my destiny. This shared conviction cemented a strong bond between us which was only reinforced by our kinship. I was trained in a tradition that stretches back over centuries over which it has been constantly evolving. And so have I been evolving, both outwardly into other dance cultures and inwardly into my own tradition where an inner process of distillation constantly creates increasing maturity and transforms the early thrill into a deep-seated rapture of dance.
As I look back, my mind wanders into three related but distinct worlds whose overlapping images mark the passage of time, transition and growth. One set of images shows my growth as a dancer. From those faltering steps at age three, they take me through various stages of my training, progressively maturing me first into an accomplished Bharatanatyam and then into an Odissi dancer. The big transition occurred with my migration to Canada, exposing me to Western dance and music, and leading me into experiments of early ‘fusion’ choreography and then into various possibilities of developing contemporary forms of Indian dance.
The second set of parallel images captures my growth from a child to an adolescent girl, to a young woman searching for fulfillment in painting, performing, teaching, and creating choreography in India, in Canada and in the world at large. This is a personal story of growing up in an Indian city and then living in the wholly different world of Canada.
The third set of images, interwoven with the other two, portray the outer life of the two societies in India and Canada, both responding to world-wide changes when an old era passes yielding its place to new, and you awake to a sense of both fear and hope. I was truly a child of this larger transition that marked the world into which I was born and lived. Born in 1942, when the second world war was at its height, and within India, Mahatma Gandhi was bringing his struggle for India’s independence to its last ditch intensity, I naturally inherited a sense of catastrophic change where the old world would disappear into the uncertainties of an emerging world, where cultures would both collide and coalesce at the same time. My growing up in India that was groping to modernize in the midst of a newly discovered sense of traditional identity, and my subsequent migration to Canada and the larger canvas of world dance and music aptly mirror all the outer changes which were rocking the established societies all over the world.
One of these days I want to create a work for my own dancing where the three sets of images will interpenetrate one another through music and dance.
See Menaka Thakkar return to the Harbourfront Centre stage for a solo tribute to Rabindranath Tagore at In the Further Soil Nov. 12th and Nov.13th.
Performance Dates and Times:
When: November 11, 2011; 8 pm
November 12, 2011; 2 pm Matinee; 8 pm
Where:Fleck Dance Theatre, Harbourfront Centre, 207 Queens Quay West, Toronto
Tickets: Adults | $35 main floor, $30 balcony
Seniors | $28 main floor, $25 balcony
Students | $15
MTDC Members | $25 main floor, $20 balcony
Harbourfront Next Steps
Adults | $27.50 main floor, $22.50 balcony
Seniors | $23 main floor, $20 balcony
Click HERE for more information or email admin@menakathakkardance.org.
For tickets, click HERE or call 416.973.4000.
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