The Dance Pilgrim

Rasikas in Malaysia are undoubtedly familiar with the Temple of Fine Arts (TFA), an institution synonymous with Indian arts and culture. It was established in 1981 by the spiritual guru, Swami Shantanand Saraswati together with dance gurus, Master Gopal Shetty and Master V.K. Sivadas. My own association with TFA began in 1994 when I started work at the Akademi Seni Kebangsaan, known as ASWARA (Akademi Seni Budaya dan Warisan Kebangsaan since 2006). In 1998, when I was appointed the Dean of the School of Dance, I courted their services to deliver the bharatanatyam syllabus as a core course for the duration of the 3-year Diploma and the 3-year Bachelor program that began in 2008. However, it was only in 2025, while I was on a visit to India with Shankar Kandasamy and Umesh Shetty that I first heard of the name P. Suryakala or Suryakala Akka as she is fondly known, and learned how important she was to TFA, through the lineage of the great teacher Padmashri Guru K. N. Dandayuthapani Pill...

    ChitAmbara is the non-profit performance and collaboration arm of the Saraswati Mahavidhyalaya (SMV) in Perth, Australia, and a sister organization of The Temple of Fine Arts Kuala Lumpur.   The institution “ whose vision is to be a centre for artistic and scientific learning, in keeping with holistic values, was the brainchild of the late founder Swami Shantanand Saraswati. His Holiness envisioned an institute where arts and sciences, ancient and modern, can be learned and explored, synthesised into a holistic experience for the student, since “Truth is One and Paths are Many”. The ultimate goal is to serve humanity through education. ‘Saraswati’ literally means ‘that which is constantly flowing’. ‘Maha’ means great and ‘Vidhyalaya’ translates ‘to seat of knowledge’, therefore “a great seat of knowledge that constantly enlightens the ever changing and moving mind.” ChitAmbara is working primarily towards creating a space for creative collaborations, nurturing talent...

  Wong Kit Yaw is described by those who know him, have met him or have heard of him in many, many different ways. He is an artist who is a fount of knowledge, a disciplinarian, a tyrant, a gentle giant, dramatic, fun-loving, lovable, hysterical at times, and an always generous man. He is a choreographer, educator, director and a dance pioneer in Malaysia who entered the world of dance in a most unusual manner – leaving the passion for performance nurtured in high school in Teluk Intan for a career in construction and as a site supervisor in Singapore in the late 1970s. He then chose a path less travelled, and relinquished greater financial security of construction work for the love of dance. He enrolled in full-time training at the Nanyang Academy of Fine Arts (NAFA), Singapore in 1980. Here he underwent a comprehensive program of training in Chinese classical and folk dance, Indian classical dance, Malay folk dance and contemporary dance. Over the last decades, he has continued t...

Introduction There is a town (which is more like a village) named Khajuraho, which is a 13-hour train ride southeast of New Delhi, the largest city and the capital of India, that hosts the India’s oldest dance festival – the Khajuraho International Dance Festival every year since 1975. Why would a festival of dance take place “in the middle of nowhere”?   Fig. 1: Khajuraho Train Station. Photo: Author I was very privileged to attend in 2023 and arrived at the hot, barren, clay-filled and poorly-maintained train station and was overwhelmed by the heat and the smells of cow dung, goats, stray dogs, excrement and more – the smell of all poor rural areas in India, I assume. It was an onslaught to the senses and while it was not pleasant, it was an experience that I was anticipating. Although I am of Indian origin, I have hardly spent time in India, and this was my first visit to this place and this festival. As a dance artist, I have never studied and do not practice any Indian art...

The book Moving Bodies, Navigating Conflict: Practicing Bharata Natyam in Colombo, Sri Lanka  published by Wesleyan University Press in 2020 details the complex location and representation of Bharata Natyam, a classical dance form accepted to have emerged from the South Indian state of Tamil Nadu. The author, Ahalya Satkunaratnam is a professor of arts and humanities at Quest University Canada and a Bharata Natyam exponent with a diverse, multinational upbringing that is reflected in her approach to research and academia. Added to the lens of the postcolonial feminist scholar, this study on the practice of Bharata Natyam in Colombo, Sri Lanka is ground-breaking. She has researched and described in the most poetic, academic language, the intricacies that can be read into the practice of Bharata Natyam. What has made it even more fascinating, is that this foregrounds the civil war of Sri Lanka and the heightened religious and ethnic wars that have plagued the country. Satkunaratnam e...