Living the journey called dance

It was a meeting of two souls who immersed themselves in the world of dance. When the eyes met little did they know that they would be spending the rest of their lives together.  Having spent over 21 years dancing, teaching, travelling and facing the odds of life together, Sandhya and Kiran are a couple who keep alive the magic of life with their passion for dance.

In the city recently for a felicitation by Ananya, an arts organisation and a short recital, the couple sat down to share their story. They laugh at the recollection of their first rendezvous. “I think both of us distinctly remember the day we met each other—it was not even vaguely prophetic!” says Sandhya. “Sandhya and I were very good friends for a couple of years before I proposed to her,” recalls Kiran. But their decision was met with a lot of resistance.

“It was because we decided to marry young and to take up Bharatanatyam as a career option. May be our elders thought we were immature. It was not easy for any parent to think that their son was going to take up dancing as a career, especially as a male dancer. Very few male dancers make it to the top,” he says.
The couple trained under Padmini Ravi initially and later the famed Dhananjayans. Kiran and Sandhya, also known as The Kirans, established their dance school Rasika in 1990.

“We started as a small one-room establishment with about five students. Teaching was never a substitute to performing—we saw it primarily as a method of sharing what we knew and realised it was a great tool for learning too,” says Kiran. He opines that while no classical art form can compete with popular arts in terms of the number of performances or audiences, it has its own appeal and following.

Performances abroad soon came calling. “The opportunities gave us a new perspective to revisit our own traditional dance form,” says Sandhya.“Today, the general mindset has changed. It is an accepted fact that you can make a profession out of your passion. But we were not so lucky 20 years ago,” adds Sandhya. “We devised our own style of duet dancing; choreography (a term that was hardly used those days) was of paramount importance and building our school from scratch taught us a lot.”

The couple believe in learning continuously and moving with the times. “Equipping ourselves technically is an ongoing process! Creativity never comes on demand, so we have to be sufficiently prepared and alert enough to receive it whenever it comes,” says Sandhya. They have a daughter who shares her name with the dance institution. “She is 16 years old and yes, she dances too. We hope she will take it up as a career someday,” hopes Sandhya.