I’ve never known a version of myself without dance. I was born and raised in the immersive environment of a dance school for bharatanatyam (a form of Indian classical dance) that my parents founded in Los Angeles before I was born. My mother, Viji Prakash, was my first dance teacher, a passionate performer, and my inspiration.
Since I can remember, the world of dance has felt magical and filled me with wonderment. While the music and rhythm inspire me to move, it is the stories that breathe life. From childhood, the colorful body of myth that surrounds bharatanatyam was the lens through which I made sense of the world around me. Inhabiting various characters allowed me to understand relationships and different perspectives that existed beyond my own experience.
Growing up in the U.S. while practicing a form that has cultural roots in India shaped my creative voice—it was born out of a sense of duality and tension. For so long, I wanted my audiences to feel the humanity of the stories that I could so easily relate to, to not see them as “foreign” just because they belonged to the Indian culture. Over time, I’ve realized that it is my own questions about those stories, and the way those questions reflect the tension between our values as individuals and a society, that allow my voice to feel accessible, beyond the cultural specificity of my art form.
My creative impulses are driven by experiences—personal, social, political, spiritual. I’m inspired by music, poetry, and other artists whom I admire. I’ve been particularly impacted by my mentors and dancer/choreographers Malavika Sarukkai and Akram Khan, and musician T.M. Krishna. They have used their Indian classical training to pave paths that are uniquely their own. They inspire me to find conviction in my own voice while constantly challenging myself: to find inspiration in the search as much as the discoveries.
Over three and a half decades of training and performing, if there is one thing that dance has constantly demanded of me, it is surrender. It doesn’t always happen. There is self-doubt, a body that comes with limitations, a mind that is managing so many things at once. But the striving for that singularity of focus is the surrender. And dance demands that of you, to push past everything to jump into the unknown and give of yourself wholly. Ultimately, that experience of surrender is why I dance.
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