Pt. Chitresh Das, who died last week, was a pioneer in introducing Indian performing arts in the US
Pandit Chitresh Das, the Kathak Maestro who passed away in north California recently at the age of 70, has left a remarkable legacy to the international dance world. He was a true pioneer in introducing excellence in Indian performing arts to largely non-Indian audiences and students in the United States from 1970 onwards. Known as a dynamic and prolific artist, he was indefatigable in his dedication to sharing his art with ever-widening audiences nationally and internationally.
“Because I am a pioneer in this country, I have to do this,” he said in 1989. “For a Western audience, I must think of how to be accessible. If I just danced for three hours doing all these different things, it might be very good, but I have the mission to spread the knowledge of Kathak without breaking the tradition and keeping it intact.”
At the age of 26, Chitresh Das arrived in America with the proverbial eight dollars in foreign exchange allowed to travellers abroad in 1970. His first year was supported by a Whitney Fellowship to study modern dance and teach Kathak at the University of Maryland. During that year he had a solid introduction to modern dance and commuted to New York City, the Mecca of Modern Dance where he stayed with two of the greatest modern dancers of all time, Alwin Nikolai and Murray Louis. This exposure to the best in the west inspired him to experiment within his own Kathak tradition in future years without any urge to fuse dance vocabularies. His motto was “Freedom comes from refined discipline with responsibility.”
Pandit Chitresh Das grew up in the vibrant atmosphere of his parents’ Calcutta dance school with visitors like Rukmini Devi, Uday Shankar, Balasaraswati and Shambu Maharaj coming home. By the age of nine, young Chitresh had the opportunity to perform accompanied by the great Pt Samta Prasad on table. By the time he came to America, he was well prepared by his guru, Pt Ram Narayan Misra to represent his art anywhere in the world.
An invitation from Ustad Ali Akbar Khan in 1971 kept him in the US and set him on a lifelong course, first establishing a dance program at the Ali Akbar College of Music in San Rafael, California and later creating his own institution, Chhandika, which has branches in India and the US. The early 70’s in the US was a time of a rising wave of interest in Indian performing arts by Americans, from young enthusiasts and hippies to adult connoisseurs. These were the initial core of dedicated disciples of Pt. Das who went on to create branches of his school in Los Angeles, Boston, Toronto and performed in his troupe. In later decades, the children of Diaspora NRIs flocked to Chhandika and other Indian dance schools to imbibe the rich cultural heritage of India’s performing arts.
In 1978, I was thrilled to discover the high calibre of Indian dance being taught (and learned) in the US when I first saw Chitresh Das and his students on my arrival in California after my initial five years in India studying Manipuri and later Odissi and Mayurbhanj Chhau. Where I grew up, there was no community of Americans actually learning traditional Indian performing arts as there was in California. My exposure to India was through family friends, sculptor Narendra Patel, my first Manipuri guru, Minati Roy and great performances such artists as Uday Shankar, Balasaraswati, Ravi Shankar and Gopi Krishna. In India, I became aware that many US based dance gurus had minimal qualifications to teach with reputation that seemed to grow the farther away they were from home. With this background, to arrive back in the US and see a genuinely top-notch Kathak performance was a truly a joy. Hard work and a lifetime of unstinting dedication took Pt. Chitresh Das’s artistic and cultural contributions to the highest levels of well deserved success and recognition, including becoming a National Endowment for the Arts Traditional Arts Heritage Awardee in 2009 and receiving numerous other awards and grants for his contribution to Kathak Dance, including from the Olympic Arts Festival, National Dance Project, Rockefeller Foundation, Irvine Fellowships in Dance, among others.
He was as dynamic solo performer as well as a supremely innovative choreographer constantly exploring innovation within tradition. His senior most American disciple, Gretchen Hayden-Ruckert, recalled, “When Charles Reinhart, director of the famed American Dance Festival called organisers in India searching for the quintessential Kathak dancer for his premiere of Festival of the Feet, they said, the artist you are searching for sits in the US, in California, much of the year. Though not the first time, Kathak, Flamenco and Tap were brought together on the same stage; it was the first meeting of Pandit Das and Jason Samuels Smith. Since they met in 2004, they have been touring the world electrifying audiences everywhere, each concert different in its way because neither artist relies on choreography, but pure unadulterated upaj, and also abhinaya!”
Beyond teaching Kathak technique, Chitresh Das evolved Nine Principles of Chhandam beginning with attitude and etiquette, “My Guruji was more concerned with how I walked into the dance class than with how I danced.” His core principals of systematic training practice, knowledge, Guru-Disciple tradition went further to encompass devotional practice for life and sacrifice and selfless service. Kathak yoga was developed in the 1990’s by going deeply into the roots of his art as a meditation in motion unifying breath, voice, movement, footwork, abhinaya and even playing an instrument at the same time.
In 1987, Pt. Das was established the first accredited Kathak course in the US at San Francisco State University (SFSU) and began teaching and touring annually in Germany, Poland, Hungary with Tanzprojekt as well as expanding his school in the US. Today the Chhandam Chitresh Das Dance Company (CCDDC), is one of the world’s foremost Indian classical dance companies and the largest Indian classical dance school in North America. This commitment to appreciation of the universal aspects of Kathak in the USA was coupled with a dedication to regularly returning to India to train new artists and share his collaborations and choreographies that have been called “a blueprint for world peace”, sharing unique traditions without compromising the depth of each through fusion. Pt. Das gave so generously of himself and his art, and made the world a much better, kinder, more beautiful and sensitive place in the process. His wife Celine, daughters, Shivaranjani and Saadhvi, his disciples, students will carry on his legacy through Chhandam with the support of the countless people he has touched.
Sharon Lowen is a respected exponent of Odissi, Manipuri and Mayurbhanj and Seraikella Chau whose four-decade career in India was preceded by 17 years of Modern Dance and Ballet in the US and an MA in Dance from the University of Michigan. She can be contacted at sharonlowen.workshop@gmail.com
