A Year of Dancing, Collaborations and Memories: Personal Reflections on 2016

2016 has been a year of good memories, spent with loved ones, dance colleagues, and in adventures in dance and music. This was a year that Mike and I decided to stay mostly in Toronto, even while overseas opportunities presented themselves, in order to give it a year in our beloved city, and towards our home studio.

 My year began with the Dance Ontario Dance Weekend 2016 performance with Sampradaya Dance Creations at the Fleck Dance Theatre at Harbourfront Centre.  Gratitude to Sampradaya Dance Creations for working with classical Indian dancers of our generation, and it was delightful to work alongside the wonderful Atri Nundy, Harikrishna S Nair and Reshmi Chhetram towards this performance. This is a photo from us after our performance.

January was also a time of reconnecting and dancing with dance friends. We did a reunion show with The Saucy Tarts, called "Because We CanCan" at Club 120. I loved meeting some of the first founder members of Toronto's first cancan performance company during the course of this journey. I also reconnected with some of Toronto's Living Room Rom friends at "Fireside Chat with Paromita Kar," hosted by LRR at the beautiful Dark Side Studio. What a magical space! I had the pleasure of talking about my travels to Turkey last year for study of Turkish Romani dance.

The end of January took me to St. Johns, Newfoundland, as part of Sampradaya Dance Company's performance at the Friends of India 50th Anniversary Gala. We arrived at St. John's on a snowy day, predicted to also be the date of a major snowstorm, and were shown around some of the beautiful areas of St. John's before the storm hit in the afternoon! Gratitude to our wonderful hosts and all those we met during this journey..it was a memorable and enjoyable performance and stay, and ofcourse to Sampradaya Dance Creations.

  These photos show two of the beautiful places we got to see when we were shown around St. John's..the easternmost point of Canada, and lots of ice looking beautiful!  Below is a photo of all of us after the performance.

Photo Credit: Rambinder 'Randy' Cheema

February was a month of artistic collaborations, and Mike and I performed our first Toronto-based live music-dance public collaboration at the Artists Play Cabaret, hosted at Artists Play. 

 



March was a month full of performances, but the highlight of this month, for me, was the debut of Ensemble Topaz, a joint music-dance venture co-initiated by Mike Anklewicz and myself, and working with music and dances of Turkey, Central Asia, the Balkans, and South Asia.

In April, I had the  honour of presenting my research paper at the Opre Khetanes IV Concert and Conference hosted by the Initiative of Romani Music Conference at New York University. It was a time of learning a great deal from other scholars and artists, and also humbling and renewing experience.  This was also the year that many parts of the conference were livestreamed, and my family was able to watch my presentation and many other presentations remotely through this new and exciting technological feature of the conference. Below is a photo of me during my presentation.

The month of May marked the beginning of wedding season performances. This was also Asian Heritage Month, and Ekakshara Dance Creations performed for several Asian Heritage Month events such as Culturalicious at Richmond Hill and the South Asian Homelands Festival at the Toronto Public Libraries, and finally, the Carassauga India Pavillion.

Wedding season continued into June, and also in the month, I was cast into the Desilive team of live performers at Taste of India at the Taste of Peterborough Festival (also my first time visiting Peterborough).

Photo Credit: Jamie Steel

http://www.mykawartha.com/community-story/6707406-crowds-flock-to-charlotte-street-in-peterborough-for-taste-of-downtown/

Highlights of July included the always memorable Kingdom of Osgoode weekend, where Mike and I performed with Troupe Obskurah, for a weekend of performances and everything medieval! 

August highlights include the Ensemble Topaz performance at the CNE International Stage (Canadian National Exhibition), where all of the ensemble members of Topaz performed together. 

Photo Credit: BlameitonMauricio

Photo Credit: BlameitonMauricio 

The month also marked our return to the Toronto International Youth Dance Festival at the Nathan Philips Square. I include below a photo from this event. 

Photo Credit: Hugh Li 

Also, this was the month where I performed as "Saraswati" as part of Irene Cortes's contemporary opera "Gata", a site-specific piece at the Sherbourne Commons at Waterfront. This was also a wonderful time of meeting many incredible artists all involved in the production. 

A fun memory from September is the wonderful Afghan-Canadian celebration at Tamahac Club at Ancaster, which I performed along with the dancers of Ensemble Topaz. 

I also had a wonderful time performing and meeting the wonderful Hamilton region dance community at the monthly "Harem" at The Casbah dance showcase, organized by Eshe Yildiz and Mahasti. What a fabulous monthly dance initiative! 

October was the month of Diwali season performances. It also saw me teaching the Spicy Bollywood Workshop at Oakville's beautiful BellyUp Bellydance Studio. Gratitude to Joharah for having me!

The lunar calendar this year positioned Diwali festivities between the months of October and November, so Diwali performances continued into November. Another unique experience was being the Pop Up Artist at the Aga Khan Museum over a November weekend. I had a chance to perform at several of the beautiful spaces within the museum, such as the Bellerive Room, designed in the style of Persian Salons. 

Performance at Aga Khan Museum lobby. Photo Credit: Sevencontinentsonelifetime 

Performance at the Bellerive Room. Photo Credit: Amin Bhanji

December highlights: On a personal note, this was the month of my wedding! Mike and I tied the knot on December 4, 2016 in an Indo-Jewish wedding celebration attended by our families and friends. 

Our end of the year performances included some corporate Holiday performances, and ofcourse the Ensemble Topaz performance at the Toronto International Dance Festival hosted by Dancing Damsels at the Fleck Dance Theatre at Harbourfront Centre. Including below a photo from this performance. 

Photo Credit: Gary Gu 

It has been a good year, 2016. I leave it feeling much gratitude for all the family, friends, colleagues, and those whom I have around me, and the fortune to work, dance and spend time with!

Dancing the Moods: Ragas, Makams and Dastgahs

As a dancer and also someone who had started out an academic career originally in Psychology as the primary discipline, I am perpetually interested in the "moods" and psychological states affected by performance.  The raaga system within classical Indian music has a number of ways of classifying music, and one of these is by the psychological state evoked by each Raaga. In addition, the rasa theory from the Natyashastra treatise, which also links the performance to the evocation of a specific mood within the spectator, also holds a significant centrality for the classical Indian performing arts.

In the context of classical Odissi dance, we dancers work with highly structured repertoire pieces, which are composed by our gurus, and senior gurus of our lineage traditions (gharanas).  For me, in the context of Odissi dance, the moods/ragas theory has been an entry point into conceptualizing an overall mise-en-scene for a piece or production. In 2013, when I performed my feature-length solo show "Corpus Matris" at the Toronto International Fringe Festival, I performed the repertoire choreographed by Guru Durgacharan Ranbir.  I wanted a dynamic relationship between the dance and the lighting design, and this was where the ragas and relationship to mood came in.  My show began with "Vajrakanti Pallavi", one of Guruji's beautiful and distinctive compositions (pallavi is an abstract dance within the Odissi repertoire). One of my former mentors, Sushree Mishra Kar, from Calgary, who is both a classical Odissi dancer and Odissi singer, sent me more information on the Raag Vajrakanti's classification on the mood theory,  and that it considered to be a "melancholy" raaga, associated with late night/early morning times. This information I provided to my lighting designer, Parker Nowlan, to help structure an overall mood for this section of the performance.   

Photo above: from "Corpus Matris" (2013), Theatre Passe-Muraille Mainspace, Toronto. 

Lighting Design: Parker Nowlan

In 2016, when I visited Turkey under a grant from the Canada Council for the Arts, in order to study several different dance forms of Turkey, I had the privilege of undertaking a lesson in Turkish Makam Theory under Okan Ҫakmak of Istanbul.  To me, it felt like the learning of dance tradition would remain incomplete without knowledge of the music, and its philosophical and aesthetic bases.  Ҫakmak had been Mike's clarinet instructor for Turkish style clarinet, and with this being the common ground, Mike and I took this lesson together. It was fascinating to learn about the music theories of Al Farabi and Ibn Sina, and also that most of these makams were associated with zodiacs as well as psychological and physical states.  

Another choreographic study I did earlier in the year was "A Study in Dastgah Shur", based upon the Persian modal system of music (dastgahs). I presented sections of the piece in April 2016. Once again I found myself intrigued by the theory of specific moods being evoked by the different dastgahs.  

Mike and I currently involved in a number of music-dance projects and collaborations. Among these was "An Encounter in Hicaz," which we presented a few times in Toronto. We also continue to collaborate on a longterm project, titled "Vignettes of Sringaar", in which I aim to bring in some of my study of rasas and moods.

Our most active project is  Ensemble Topaz, a music-dance ensemble featuring a trio of dancers, and several musicians. Among my favourite performances this year with the Ensemble has been the CNE International Stage in August.  Tomorrow (September 29, 2016), we have our presentation for Culture Days at the Annette Street library, from 1:00-2:00 pm, featuring some of our musicians, and a few of our dancers, playing select pieces of our repertoire. We have been told that there will be school classes visiting our presentation and we greatly look forward to sharing our work with the next generation! For more information on Ensemble Topaz at Culture Days:

https://culturedays.ca/en/2016-activities/view/5735fb68-3c68-413d-abaa-1c364c4a89be

New Adventures in Music and Dance II: Ensemble Topaz

It has been six months into the adventure called Ensemble Topaz, an integrated music-dance project jointly co-led by myself and musician/composer Mike Anklewicz, and tomorrow we perform at the CNE International Stage. Earlier this year, I had written a post titled "New Adventures in Music and Dance", in which I had mentioned that this year would be a signal year marking collaborative work between Mike and myself. The post was written a few days before our performance at Artist's Play Cabaret, where we performed a music-dance collaboration drawing on Indo-Central Asian dance aesthetics, as well as Mike's improvisations drawing from his background in jazz and klezmer as well as drawing on some of his study of Turkish scales in Istanbul last year with Okan Cakmak.

About a month after this February performance, we brought together the first version of Ensemble Topaz, which performed at The Tranzac, where I performed as soloist to some of the songs played by live the band. I also accompanied on zills to a few of the songs, sitting in with the band, as opposed to dancing. I am sharing here a few photographs from this first performance, taken by Ken Dobb.

From there the Ensemble expanded; as choreographer, I invited two  dancers, Stephanie Stella and Angelica Marrett, both of whom I have danced with previously in different ensembles- I first met the both of them when they joined The Saucy Tarts, Toronto's very own troupe of high-kicking cancan dancers. I had also had them both in some of my other dancing ensembles, including Ekakshara Dance Creations and Dilan Dance Company. The dancers of Ensemble Topaz then went on to perform some more events, private, corporate and public. 

This is a photo of us taken after our performance at a lovely wedding at Centennial Hall, at Liberty Grand Entertainment Complex within the CNE grounds earlier this month. 

Among our repertoire is songs choreographed to the original music compositions of Mike Anklewicz from the KlezFactor album "Europa", released earlier in July this year, and this was one of the events where we danced to the fun song "Vibrations" from this album! (For more information about KlezFactor "Europa", please visit http://klezfactor.com/klezfactor-europa/) We will also be featuring "Vibrations" among our set at the CNE, as well as some more work from KlezFactor "Europa". In the meantime, the musicians of Ensemble Topaz also played a special performance at the Klezmer brunch at the FreeTimes Cafe in downtown Toronto. 

As choreographer and dancer, this shall be an interesting time for me. The repertoire for this set has been choreographed in different international cities. The set  features a dance for which I had initially conceptualized the choreography in the hotel rooms in Berlin last year, during the beginning of the KlezFactor Europe tour. 

Another of the dances, "Cosmo Alex", also an original song from KlezFactor's "Europa", was choreographed in Toronto and Netherlands last year, for performance during the earlier half of our Europe tour last year. It had both its danced and musical performance debut at the beautiful Decinska Synagogue in Decin in Czech Republic, where we performed at the Lenka Lichtenberg and Friends Concert with the beautiful Lenka. This piece too had initially been created and performed as a solo. Subsequently, Mike and I performed duet versions of this piece in a few other places, both within and outside Canada. The piece was first reworked as a duet for Angelica and I for our performance at the Global Village Festival earlier this year, and then eventually was reworked as a trio featuring all three of the  Ensemble Topaz dancers and will be performed tomorrow at the CNE set as a trio. 

Fun times and looking forward to tomorrow! 

For more fun and dance adventures, join me at the Afghan-Tajik Pop Choreography and Spicy Bollywood Dance Workshops at BellyUp Oakville on October 23! For details, information and registration, please visit: https://bellyup.ca/?q=oakville/workshops/paromita-kar-workshops-bollywood-afghan-tajik-pop

Dance and Music Adventures in New Directions!

Tomorrow, February 27, at 7:30 pm, Mike Anklewicz and I present  the beginnings of a new direction of our work together! I am deeply inspired by a song, based on a verse by Sufi poet Omar Khayam Rubai from his "Rubaiyat". I first heard this as a song six years ago, and have heard several different versions of this song  since then, and branching from this inspiration, Mike and I are working on what will be the beginnings of a new project, rooted deeply in Indo-Central Asian aesthetics, and extending to other world dance and music styles.  

I keep returning to several elements I learned choreographically during my study, thanks to the Canada Council for the Arts Grant for Professional Dancers, at the Dicle University State Conservatory Dance Department in Diyarbakir, Turkey under Gönul Özturkman. Over a brief stretch back in Istanbul, I also had incredibly interesting lesson with Timur Mashkadan and Merve Kural from the Istanbul Kafkas Dance Company. 

We perform the beginnings of this project together tomorrow, at the Artists Play a Cabaret..The Winter Edition, hosted and curated by Elizabeth Snell, at Artist's Play (401 Logan Avenue, #201) (For more info: www.facebook.com/events/1547938648853415/)