The Vrindavan Years

Danseuse Daksha Sheth’s experiments with indigenous dance forms in the holy town of Vrindavan.

- Devissaro

THE IMPETUS FOR Daksha Sheth’s career as a dancer and choreographer has always come from her very pragmatic research and training in a wide range of indigenous arts, embracing classical, folk and ritual dance, as well as various martial and akhara traditions of India. The first 20 years of Daksha’s life in dance, however, were devoted to Kathak, and Vrindavan, where Daksha lived from 1990-1993, provided an ideal environment for following an exciting line of dance research—a search for the roots of Kathak as a temple dance. Daksha and I, with our young daughter Isha and newborn son Tao, rented a large 14-room haveli within the Radha Raman Ghera in Vrindavan. The haveli had two courtyards, one on the first floor and one on the ground floor, and a large hall that served as our studio. The cost of renting this haveli was less than half the cost of the one-room barsati in Nizamuddin, New Delhi, where we had lived for a number of years.

Our initial intention in shifting to Vrindavan was to create a dynamic centre for exploration and experimentation in dance. Our experience of trying to create new work in Delhi while needing to do other day work to cover the exorbitant rents meant that the creative process was essentially a part-time and ad hoc endeavour, generally undertaken at the fag end of a long day. We saw moving to rural India as a way out of this bind. After shifting to Vrindavan, we imagined (naively, as it turned out) that other Delhi dancers would come and join us in our lifestyle experiment.

It soon became clear that Daksha and I were, however, badly out of sync with the times. While we were trying to move out of Delhi, most other dancers were keen to move into Delhi.