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Events Guide, Sep-Oct 2016

Aditi Mangaldas

An interview with Indian dancer-choreographer Aditi Mangaldas, prior to her UK tour starting at Dance Umbrella festival, London


For three decades, Aditi Mangaldas has been one of India’s pioneering exponents of classical and contemporary kathak – the dance style of fluid arms, whirlwind spins and intricate footwork best known in the UK through the work of Akram Khan. But ask her how she began and the first thing she mentions is not dance, but her family. “I was lucky to be born into a very liberal family,” she says. “They really encouraged me as a girl child to explore my potential. There was no discrimination between me and my brother. We grew up in an environment of conversation and debate. We had the liberty to disagree.”

Those freedoms were reinforced by her first guru Kumudini Lakhia, one of the two foremost kathak teachers in India, with whom Mangaldas began studying when she was five. “She encouraged questioning and openness,” says Mangaldas. “I learned to look around me – at music, at staging, at literature.” Mangaldas was soon dancing in Lakhia’s performance group, but at 21 she went to study with India’s other most acclaimed teacher, Birju Maharaj. It was a completely different experience, that she remembers as “a much more an internal journey – towards the roots of dance itself.”

The contrasting training and the formative experience of her family brought Mangaldas to a juncture where, as a young woman of 26, she decided to set out on her own. “I was raised with firm beliefs in feminism and equal opportunities, and at Maharaj’s institution I began to feel like a satellite around a male figure. I needed to find something that felt true to me, regardless of gender.” It was a precarious but liberating moment. “It was difficult, yes, but I learnt a lot. It was like learning to walk again. Both my gurus were geniuses, but you have to have doubts. That’s where exploration begins.”

Mangaldas performed first as a soloist and then with her own company, Drishtikon Dance Foundation. Her work has extended the reach of kathak dance in staging, style and subject – whether that be the intangible nature of time (Timeless, 2006) or a reaction to the notorious 2012 Delhi rape case (Within, 2013). Yet – perhaps thanks to the open horizons of her upbringing – she remains as comfortable with tradition as she is with experiment: she is more explorer than rebel. “Kathak is a river in constant motion,” she explains, “I try to be informed by its geography and history without getting bogged down by it.”

Doubts, exploration, herself – these abiding concerns are very present in her new piece Inter_rupted, showing at the Barbican as part of Dance Umbrella. “All my work begins with some autobiographical note, which I try to develop into a broader human experience,” says Mangaldas. “This one, for seven dancers, is about ageing. About fragility, disintegration – and resilience. About our attachment to a body that inevitably changes.”

“I am ageing,” she says simply, yet in a tone that suggests vulnerability, defiance, acceptance and curiosity all at once, and in which you might even detect the voice of a young girl from an open-minded family. “We all are.”