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ARTICLEMy Guru's greatest choreography: An institution that taught me to fall in love- Dr. Amrithasruthi Radhakrishnane-mail: amrita.sruthi@gmail.com July 29, 2026 (First published as an INSIGHT Column in Hindustan Times, New Delhi) Every Guru Purnima, we celebrate the guru. This year, my gratitude extends beyond my guru to the institution she has cultivated over three decades: Natya Vriksha. I have come to recognise that the greatest choreography of dancer Geeta Chandran (Akka, as generations of us affectionately call her) may not be a work created for the stage at all. It is the institution she has built. To build an institution is among the most demanding acts of artistic practice. Choreographies conclude after the final applause, but institutions demand care every single day. When I first entered Natya Vriksha as a young student, everyone around me believed I was enrolling in a dance school, where I would acquire a vocabulary of movement and, one day, perform. Little did I know that this was where my becoming would quietly unfold. Today, whatever I have become, as a dancer, researcher, a teacher, administrator, and a cultural practitioner, has its roots there. Natya Vriksha gave me ground steady enough to take flight from, and a place to land each time I returned. The vocabulary, I now realise, was only the visible curriculum. What we were actually learning took me years to name. We were being taught how to fall in love. What began in 1993 in a living room with a handful of students is today an artistic home for over 400. What is remarkable is that each of us learnt a different way of falling in love with dance: some with rhythm, some with poetry, some with the architecture of movement, others with teaching, choreography, and some with the quiet repetition of daily practice itself. Consider what an extraordinary thing that is: to teach someone how to fall in love with something. Because that process does not end with the art form. Learning to love something slowly, attentively, over years, changes how you encounter the world itself. It teaches patience with what you cannot yet do, curiosity about what you do not yet understand, and generosity towards those learning beside you. This is what institutions make possible. What I experience at Natya Vriksha is a modern gurukul: not a nostalgic recreation of an ancient system, but a living institution where the guru-shishya relationship is held within a community, and where tradition and contemporary life continually inform one another. The pedagogy unfolded everywhere. It happened during long rehearsals where correction became care. It happened while travelling for performances, where responsibility was shared long before we recognised it as leadership. It happened while organizing festivals, mentoring younger dancers, and quietly watching how an institution sustains itself through countless acts of labour that rarely receive applause. Without quite realizing it, we were learning administration, teamwork, accountability, discipline, and generosity alongside Bharatanatyam. An institution cultivates ways of being. Watching young people gather at Jantar Mantar and across India, over the past weeks has reminded me that institutions are held together not by buildings but by trust. Students are demanding that the examinations determining their futures be conducted with integrity. Beneath those demands lies something more fundamental: the desire to believe that the institutions shaping their lives are worthy of that trust. Arts institutions are not exempt from this responsibility. Their task is not merely to transmit technique or produce performers. They must remain spaces where people gather across generations to devote sustained attention to something larger than themselves. There is something deeply reassuring about knowing that, after every demanding day, as a teacher, researcher, colleague, daughter, partner, and citizen negotiating an increasingly hurried world, there exists a place that asks nothing of me except that I arrive. A space someone else patiently imagined and built long before I understood why I would need it. In days driven and distracted by technology and its demands, such a space enables something else in us. And what I encounter there is not only my own dance. It is someone else's. To sit quietly with another dancer's practice, to watch a body that is not yours struggle, repeat, discover, and arrive at something beautiful without wishing it were your own, is one of the rarest forms of education. It teaches you to recognise another person's journey before your own. That is not a small thing. In a time that trains us to perform, compare, and promote ourselves, the habit of attending to another before oneself is quietly political. An institution that cultivates this habit, year after year, generation after generation, is doing more than preserving an art form. It is preserving a way of being with other people. That may well be her greatest choreography. Perhaps this is what Guru Purnima asks us to honour: not only the guru who teaches, but the guru who chooses to build. Because performances end. Institutions become living works of art, and like choreography, they survive only through rehearsal: every class, every correction, every shared meal, every returning student, every act of trust renewed. Natya Vriksha taught me Bharatanatyam, certainly. More importantly, it taught me how to fall in love with something and, through that, how to be in the world. The enduring legacy of a guru is not only the disciples they inspire. It is the institution they leave behind, where countless others will continue to arrive, discover themselves, and keep falling in love.  Dr. Amrithasruthi Radhakrishnan is Assistant Professor in the Department of Art, Media and Performance at Shiv Nadar Institution of Eminence. A dancer trained by Geeta Chandran for over 25 years at Natya Vriksha, she is a performance studies scholar researching on dance, institutions, and cultural policy. Post your comments Pl provide your name along with your comment. All appropriate comments posted with name in the blog will also be featured in the site. |
