With dance choreographies integrating chinese folk cultures and physics, Santha Bhaskar would leave her mark on bharatanatyam forever, transcending borders and disciplines.
Today, her creative spirit reaches far beyond Singapore, with Bhaskar's Arts Academy spreading all the way to California and Germany.
#Singapore #Dance #Bharatanatyam
Watch more: https://www.asiaone.com/video
Today, her creative spirit reaches far beyond Singapore, with Bhaskar's Arts Academy spreading all the way to California and Germany.
#Singapore #Dance #Bharatanatyam
Watch more: https://www.asiaone.com/video
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LifestyleTranscript
00:00If you weren't a dancer, where would you have been?
00:10An astronaut, I think.
00:13Traveler.
00:14She did not like dancing when she was growing up.
00:16You know, she had this dream of being a doctor,
00:18but she got married off at 15 and ended up being a dancer.
00:21So I started choreographing my own dances,
00:24and nobody dared to correct me or ask me why you did that.
00:28That freedom was there for me.
00:42When you look at the history of the community,
00:44just like many other ethnic communities out there,
00:46in the early days, you mainly learn about men.
00:49Mrs Sanda Bhaskar is one of the rare female names that stood out to me.
00:54As a curator, I don't think we could have done an exhibition
00:57on the Malayali community without including their stories inside.
01:02She was born in 1939 in Kerala, South India, to a Malayali family.
01:08Everybody in the family learned dance and music.
01:11She did not like dancing when she was growing up,
01:13and she told me so many times that she would fake a tummy ache to get out of dance.
01:19She really liked science, and she really liked math.
01:23She told me, you know, if I could go to the university, I would be so happy.
01:27My mother ended up in Singapore by accident, through marriage.
01:31Interestingly, a lot of people thought that Mrs Sanda Bhaskar
01:35who founded the Bhaskar's Arts Academy,
01:37but it was actually her husband, Mr KP Bhaskar.
01:39His mission in life was to spread his love for the Indian arts around the world.
01:44He called his brother back in India to help him look for a bride,
01:48and they found my grandmother.
01:51So February, we got married in the beginning of February.
01:53So February, March, April.
01:55By May, first week, we already came to Singapore.
01:58My grandfather definitely brought my grandmother on an adventure.
02:05This marked the start of a 16-year-old girl's adventure
02:08to grow a dance academy from the ground up,
02:11with her new husband in their new home.
02:16When she first landed in Singapore,
02:18she used to say that, I was just amazed by the multiculturalism
02:22living amongst all these other ethnicities
02:25she only ever read about in her history books.
02:28Her first reaction was that she needed to be able to communicate
02:31because she only knew how to speak in Malayalam.
02:34She joined the British Council for classes in English,
02:37and then just language.
02:38She learned some Mandarin, she learned some Malay,
02:41just enough to survive,
02:42and she very quickly wanted to learn Chinese dance.
02:45She actually learned the ribbon dance, the sleeve dance, the sword dance.
02:51Butterfly Lovers was my mother's first cross-cultural collaboration.
02:55She saw the movie, the 1950s movie, in the movie theatres,
02:59and she came back and she was just talking about
03:02what a lovely story it was for dramatising in dance.
03:06The story is about an ancient China where a woman was not allowed to study.
03:12But this girl, Zhu Ying Tai, she really wanted to study,
03:17so she dressed up as a man to attend school,
03:20and that's where she met Liang Shan Ho,
03:24and they fell in love.
03:29I could see how my mum was so inspired by the story.
03:32A lot of themes that are very similar to Indian culture too.
03:36The whole idea of women not learning, not being able to go to school.
03:40I think this was back in 1958.
03:42It was classical Indian dance,
03:45but they wore Chinese opera costumes for the performance.
03:50Bharatanatyam is an ancient classical Indian form
03:53that is the original dance form that my grandmother was trained in.
03:58I think it would have been really different for the people of the time
04:01to see Butterfly Lovers, a well-loved Chinese story,
04:04performed in Bharatanatyam.
04:06She liked choreography more than I think anything else.
04:09I feel like she had so many ideas,
04:11and they're just waiting to be explored.
04:17But over the next 10 years,
04:19it wasn't easy to keep the Bhaskar's Arts Academy going.
04:24My parents were very trusting.
04:26People cheated them a lot.
04:27People would hire them for productions.
04:29After the performance, they would turn around and say,
04:32I'm really sorry, we didn't have any money.
04:34The second biggest challenge was finding the number of students.
04:37There weren't very many Indians who could afford to dance in those days,
04:41so they had to travel to Johor, Penang,
04:44Pahang, Ipoh, Melaka, just to survive.
04:48When Singapore became independent,
04:50I shared lots of students actually in Malaysia,
04:52but because of the separation,
04:54it made the travel there a bit more difficult.
04:57You have to make a living,
04:59so I had to be more aggressive than the local people.
05:02Trying to support us in all that was really a difficult time.
05:05How do you give your children the best education
05:08and the best opportunities when your income is already so small?
05:14They just needed to get the work out there.
05:16My mother wanted to change how she did Bharatanatyam
05:21only because they needed to survive in Singapore.
05:24Visually, how do you make it appealing to someone
05:27who didn't know anything about Bharatanatyam?
05:29Make it palatable for someone who's not Indian.
05:34I think any art form tends to morph and evolve in the diaspora,
05:38but how it grew in Singapore is totally unique
05:41because of what a melting pot Singapore is.
05:43You have Chinese, Malay, Singaporeans and Eurasians,
05:46and so at the time, the British living in Singapore.
05:49So many things I learned by watching people.
05:54We used to perform together,
05:56so we used to perform together,
05:59all ethnic groups performed together in one stage,
06:03shared same stage,
06:05and then at times we used to collaborate together.
06:11When I started choreography classes,
06:13that's when I clicked,
06:14oh my God, my mom is a genius!
06:16Because she'd never had any choreography classes,
06:18and she was using all of the choreography techniques already
06:22when in the 70s.
06:24I was like, this is my mother!
06:27Totally new level of respect for her.
06:30She changed Bharatanatyam into what it is in Singapore
06:34with her ideas.
06:35She started doing group choreography,
06:37which was unheard of in the 50s
06:39because Bharatanatyam is a solo dance.
06:41She incorporated all of the spacing elements
06:43that you use in folk dance and Chinese dance
06:45and ballet into her dance.
06:47When I was younger, she was criticized for her work.
06:50People who came from India
06:52and started teaching in Singapore would say,
06:54that's not really Bharatanatyam.
06:56She always rose up and said,
06:58you know, I am not doing anything bad,
07:00I'm not being disrespectful to the art form,
07:02I'm just modifying it to survive.
07:04And for the art form to survive,
07:06she definitely inspired everybody else
07:09to take the form and do something new with it.
07:16As her choreography and teaching career took off,
07:19Santa's past made a reappearance in her life
07:22when she was 77 years old.
07:25Getting even a very basic understanding
07:27of the complex quantum world
07:29and a physic research program took much effort.
07:32I decided that this was an idea
07:34I wanted to choreograph a dance with.
07:37When she got the opportunity at NUS
07:39to work with the Department of Quantum Physics,
07:41I think she was the first one to raise up her hand
07:44and say, yep, I'll do it.
07:45If I travel around the world,
07:46I don't know whether I can come across
07:48any other Indian artist who has done
07:50such a collaboration before.
07:53Thinking about it, I got goosebumps.
07:54I do believe that she enjoyed
07:57bringing the science into her practice
07:59because that was a part of her
08:00that she had to put aside.
08:03I remember coming home and they were on the sofa
08:05and my father was talking about the black hole,
08:08explaining it to my grandmother
08:10and she was like writing notes down.
08:11She went to the university to attend those lectures.
08:15She was in her 70s, yeah.
08:17I was actually in the piece.
08:19One of it was about particles.
08:22There was one that was intertwining.
08:24Even the music at some points was a bit unusual.
08:27It was like electronic music.
08:29Everything was like, it didn't look right
08:31but it made sense.
08:35I think to a certain extent,
08:36you have to be childlike to be creative.
08:40And that was my mother.
08:43In the 1950s, the Bhaskar's Arts Academy
08:47started with just a handful of students.
08:50But it grew to more than 2,000 strong over the years.
08:54Everywhere I went, Bhaskar's Arts Academy
08:56would always stand out.
08:58It's always the name that we hear.
09:01Mid-80s, I think, is when it started to get better.
09:04They found a space at Stamford Arts Centre
09:06and that's when things started to really,
09:09really boom for us, I think.
09:12I think we were there for 29 years
09:14and at that point of time,
09:15it was our biggest piece that we've had.
09:17We had so many students.
09:19It was always busy.
09:21It was always noisy.
09:22Feet stamping on the ground or drums playing.
09:25The scale of the productions really upped at that time
09:29because we grew, we had more students,
09:31we had more money.
09:33I often saw her appearing in the news
09:35and I noticed that Bhaskar's Arts Academy
09:37had actually done a few performances
09:40during the National Day celebrations.
09:42She was actually the longest-serving tutor
09:44of Indian classical dance in NUS.
09:47A lot of her students would either call her auntie
09:49or they would call her grandmother.
09:51The National Heritage Board in 2021
09:53presented her with the
09:54Stewards of Intangible Cultural Heritage Award.
09:57In 1990, I believe, she was also awarded
09:59the Cultural Medallion Award for Dance.
10:01It's the highest accolade that's presented
10:03by the Singapore government.
10:05As a young Indian girl in the society,
10:07I always felt like one day I want to become
10:09as well-known as her.
10:11She never sought out any accolade.
10:13Whatever happened to them came
10:15because they were on that river.
10:21We didn't see it coming at all.
10:24We all thought that she had a good
10:2610, 15 more years to live.
10:28I remember that morning she woke up.
10:32She drove herself to NUS to teach
10:35and then after that she headed to the
10:38performing space where we were having
10:40the opening ceremony of our 70th year festival.
10:44She said that she wasn't feeling so well
10:46so she sat down and she asked for a drink.
10:49My auntie went to get her a drink
10:51but when she got back to my grandmother
10:53she was already slumped over the table.
10:57It happened at the place that she loved.
10:59She brought all of us up in that studio
11:02and to her, that was what fed her kids
11:07and nurtured the next generation of dancers.
11:33I miss her voice.
11:43I miss her wisdom and I miss her...
11:46She was just an incredible person.
11:49I would not be who I am today
11:51and be in the arts, I don't think,
11:53if it weren't for the experience I had through them.
11:59When I was really young, I would sneak
12:01into her class and she would see me
12:03so I would lie down on her lap
12:05and watch her teach her classes.
12:08My teaching style, even my dancing style,
12:11I think they all kind of go back to her.
12:14For me, she has always been my biggest inspiration.
12:17People ask me, you know,
12:19what do you want to be when you grow up?
12:20I say, I want to be just like Amuma.
12:22She told me that if it ever gets in the way
12:24of your dreams and your happiness,
12:26close it down.
12:27But it's 70 years of legacy,
12:30nothing like it anywhere in the world.
12:32They were very, one of the first artists
12:34in Singapore to stand up and say,
12:36proud to be Singaporean,
12:37this is our Singaporean art form.
12:39I'm not going to apologise for what we are.
12:41Carrying on that legacy for them is important to me.
12:44I am who I am because of that.
12:47No matter what, she made sure that
12:4970 years later, there is still a school standing.
12:52Baskar's Arts is still standing
12:54and it is now expanding.
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