A Solopreneur Taiwanese Devotes a Life to Indian Dance and Culture

Twenty years ago, when Huang Meiyu arrived alone in New Delhi to learn Bollywood dance, she feared that she would end up being a face on the posters of "missing people" she often sighted on the walls of Connaught Place.

- VENUS UPADHAYAYA

Fast forward, and today she's a trained Odissi dancer with a dance studio in Taipei, teaching Indian dance forms to young Taiwanese and also spreading an appreciation of classical Indian culture through her dance recitals on Ramayana and Shiva.

Meiyu's Taiwanese mother is wonderstruck about how an "Indian soul" got inside her daughter, and Meiyu says that her life is devoted to dance and that she has gradually come to understand what the classical Indian dances promote as, "Dancing for Gods." She says she dances for God.

Today's materialistic societies least understand or misunderstand, "dancing for God." It's even more difficult when someone is pursuing the least popular art form in a foreign society. It can be a lonely pursuit, and it calls for a lot of devotion towards the art form or, as Meiyu says, "being married to dance."

And dancing for gods isn't an unfounded concept for Indian classical dancers--Meiyu talks highly of how every ornament of an Odissi classical dancer denotes either some form of God or some ancient temple from Odisha.

"The flower you see on the head [of an Odissi dancer] represents the Lotus flower with a thousand petals that lies above the head in the head chakra, which is an energy center. It's also like the sunlight of the Konark Sun temple. The longer piece that emerges from the center of the back piece is called Tahiya, and this represents the temple spire of Lord Jagannath. Everything is linked to faith, belief, and temples," she said while sipping a beverage in a cafe in the Taichung Railway Station in Central Taiwan.

LURE OF BOLLYWOOD TO SERIOUSNESS OF CLASSICAL DANCE