Our students are excited for another opportunity to learn from the amazing creative talent Raka Maitra, founder and artistic director of Chowk Productions in Singapore. For our thirtieth anniversary in 2023, we were fortunate to have her choreograph and teach a segment of our show Isaya, and she returns this year with another original piece to share with us.
photo: Tan Ngiap Heng
Maitra is a dynamic performer and choreographer, with many well-received performances to her name. She has drawn on the traditions of Odissi and Chhau to develop her own contemporary dance language and created a significant body of original work that is thematically and visually diverse yet always bears her style.
She established her company Chowk in Singapore with a bold voice and a keen sense of origin and place. Her work has been commissioned by and presented at Singapore’s Esplanade, Visva Bharati University in Santiniketan, Melkweg in Amsterdam, Les Hivernales in Avignon, Tasmania, 10 days in the island at Tasmania, and the Kennedy Center in Washington D.C., among other venues.
Starting in the middle of June, Maitra will be working with students daily to convey an excerpt of her cerebral original work Pallavi in Time, which combines her strong interest in Odissi vocabulary with her one-of-a-kind contemporary vision.
Students will glimpse this unique perspective and discover new layers to the movements they have been studying for years, while remaining immersed in the foundations of our primary classical discipline here at Mayur. We are proud to be able to provide this occasion for learning and exchanging ideas, and honored to be working with Maitra again!
Come see the result at our June 29th, 2024 production: Trini Sutra
To our director Sukanya Mukherji, my mother, on Mother’s Day
MISHKA MUKHERJI
I’ve decided not to wait until some sad or special future occasion to say how grateful I am to my mom for my life in dance, especially at Mayur. Anyone who has spent time around the two of us knows that I’m probably less nice to her than anyone else in my life. You’ve all heard us argue – I’m embarrassed to admit how often I’ve spoken sharply to her in front of other people! – and yet she has made so much room for my voice in her decisions over the years as director of Mayur. Students see a lot of me in the classroom these days, and it’s only because she has trusted me and taught me, continues to teach me, how to be an effective, loving, and generous teacher. I have a long way to go, but I’ve already found so much joy and fulfillment in the classroom, thanks to the opportunity and instruction I’ve received.
Ma has a bold personality and a larger-than-life presence; she is talkative and assertive, and she loves to share stories and wisdom from her long and varied experience in dance. You sense how she can fill a room, or a conversation. Yet she has made space for so many people, worked so incredibly hard to organize and create opportunities for anyone who cares enough and puts in the effort. She’s put together shows for hundreds of dancers now, coming up with new ideas every year and thinking of how to include every student at every level so they get a chance to experience the thrill (and the effort!) of performing on a real stage; painstakingly making, maintaining, and rearranging costumes for over 30 years, which is why kids at Mayur don’t have to pay for new costumes every year and still look great on stage. She’s invited artists to perform in our area so we get to experience and know about the wider world of dance, and she’s paid special attention to promoting dancers who are trying to establish themselves in this country despite the difficult odds. She’s organized travel for entire groups of us, remembering dates of everyone’s semesters, exams, work schedules, and holidays, and finding ways to work around them. Even in scheduling classes, she puts an unbelievable amount of time and thought into arranging it so parents of enrolled siblings don’t have to drive twice on Sundays, student teachers don’t have to begin too early in the morning or stay too late in the evening, students with other commitments or homes far away can still make it. I don’t have a lot of experience with other schools and companies, but I can’t imagine everyone does these things.
She’s given me, a person who she really wasn’t sure would ever even be able to dance, and a person who has certainly not always deserved it, a chance to discover how much I can love something; that thing is not only dance, but teaching, creating, community, and a platform to try new things, which she built from the ground up and is so generous in sharing – that thing is belonging to Mayur. I don’t say this enough, but the part of this gift that I cherish most of all is the chance to work with her and continue learning from her. I can say with absolute certainty that I would never have found this major, beloved part of my life without her, and that it wouldn’t be nearly so satisfying working with anyone else; it is humbling, in a good way. There is a reason so many people come back to her year after year, even if they stop attending classes, even if they’re not related to her by blood – she’s still there, ready to give them a push (and a healthy dose of no-nonsense wisdom), if they ever want it. So Ma, there’s really no way to thank you enough (or apologize enough for how difficult I can be), but I thought it was about time I gave it a try. Happy Mother’s Day, and thank you – for everything. All of us at Mayur are very lucky to have you, and no one more so than me.
Capping off a year of activities celebrating Mayur’s 30 years, Mayur Dance embarked on an India tour in 2024. A group of nine Mayur dancers performed at 3 locations; Children’s Little Theatre, Kolkata; Arthshila, Santiniketan; Triveni Music & Art Center, Varanasi.
The following blogs recap the experiences of four Mayur dancers who performed during this tour.
