Dance Instruction in Winnipeg

About Carnatic Music Concerts in Winnipeg in the 1970s.

The other day I was asked to talk about my dance instruction projects of the 1970s by someone who is planning to do what I am doing here, namely put on record the history of Indo-Canadians in Winnipeg.  I have all the notes, that I thought I would post on this blog when I came chronologically to the late 1970s, but have now decided that chronological order can be worked on later.  It is more important to record events as one remembers them.

I was always interested in dance. 

In the late 1960s, on a visit to India, watching Kamala Laxman perform "Nathar mudi melirukkum nalla pambe" addressed to the cobra on Siva' matted coils (and what one saw on the stage was a majestic writhing dancing snake more than a human dancer!),  and Krishnaveni of Kalakshetra dance with exquisite pathos and joy the role of Andal in Andal Charitram made me think of what we were missing, living in Winnipeg and not in Chennai. At some point I started on a novel about a dancer, that I progressively composed in my head every night, and though I remember every detail of the plot even today, I probably never wrote a word of it for I can't find even a scrap of it anywhere.

Every visit to India brought home the same feeling - that we were missing something here in Canada, and that I should do something about imparting knowledge of India's art forms to the children in our community.

Not that we were totally deprived of India's fine arts.  Though we were hardly a dozen Tamil-Telugu-Kannada speaking families in Winnipeg, not really enough to raise sufficient funds,  we did have Carnatic music concerts a couple of times a year, thanks to the efforts of Dr. R. Padmanabhan who was in touch with an organizer in Toronto (or may be he was based in Montreal) who arranged tours of Carnatic musicians from India.

This calls for a digression from my dance instruction involvement!

The reason why Winnipeg was always included on the music-concert-organiser's list is relevant to the way things worked in those days.  Usually there were three artistes in the visiting troupe - a singer, a mridangam player and a violinist.  The organiser's deal with them was that their travel, boarding and lodging arrangements would be taken care of by the organisers  and they would be paid a fee only after a certain number of concerts, a number that was specified in their contract. The organiser had to scramble to get at least the required number of concerts to cover his own commitment, even if lower fees had to be negotiated.

Given that the bigger cities insisted on having only weekend concerts, there had to be a place where the artistes could stay free of charge during the week - and guess what that place was - Winnipeg.   There were three or four families - I was not one of them - who were open to hosting the musicians during their stay in Winnipeg.  So Winnipeg got the concert for a lower fee provided it was scheduled during the week, and also got the pleasure/responsibility of hosting the artistes for four days.  The poor artistes had to rush from city to city during the weekends, covering at least two cities every weekend, but that is another story.

That was a digression but a necessary one to place on record.  May be Padmanabhan will at some point tell us about other details of organizing music concerts where the maximum attendance never exceeded twenty!

Back to my main thread next time!