First long term dance instruction course in Winnipeg

This was the very first full fledged dance instruction course in Bharata Natyam conducted in Winnipeg.  There had been one-day workshops where a professional dancer came from elsewhere and led a group of participants through some basic steps but this course went well beyond that.  Meeting a minimum of four hours per week over twenty five days (April 21 to May 15, 1978), it was an intensive course that led ten students through basic steps and adavus (hand gestures) to an Invocation dance (Vara Veena) and an Alarippu and a little of Jateeswaram.

There were eleven students from Winnipeg and three from out of town. The out-of-town students were Arun, Anil and Gita Sud, who came all the way from Ethelbert every weekend and had special classes.  The Winnipeg students were,  alphabetically by last name, Reeni Bose, Natasha Carvalho, Shyamala and Sowmya Dakshinamurti, Nimisha Mehta, Raji Parameswaran, Lalita and Hema Puri, Arlene Poliah, Anita and Leena Sarkar.  Raji, at age eight,  was the youngest and Lalita the oldest (or maybe it was Nimisha who was the oldest.)  Nimisha's family was from Kenya and she was already knowledgeable about Kathak.  She could not come for all the classes.

Six of the ten girls were small enough that they could stand in two rows without their outstretched arms bumping into each other in my 12 ft wide rec-room of tiled linoleum.

I remember the nine inch square tiles splashed with green and brown. (We changed the flooring to wood a few years ago and hence the nostalgia!)   When we came with our real estate agent to see the house in the Fall of 1971, we could hardly see the floor, strewn as it was with comics and newspapers all over the recreation room. (Later, the teenage boy who owned them became Winnipeg's leading, may be only, seller of old comic books.)   When we moved into the house in January, I saw the tiles were caked with a thick layer of dirt.  When I told my sister-in-law about the muck, with her Irish practicality she advised me to get on my knees and scrub.  Which I did, and umpteen dirty buckets later, lo, the floor was shining and smooth, fit for princesses!
Which is what the ten girls were - little princesses going through the dance steps four days a week after a long day at school.

But even more than that was the camaraderie of the seven mothers.  We sat upstairs and chatted while the girls danced downstairs, and every weekend, one of us had Mrs. T (and me of course!) for dinner.  Speaking of dinner, Mrs. T did not ask for much but was clear that she required salad and vegetables for lunch, and two chappattis and rasam for dinner, along with dal etc of course.  So, I made rasam for all of us every lesson-day and we sipped rasam and chatted.

Next: How we danced the floor off Winnipeg stages.