Astad Deboo - dancer par excellence

Astad Deboo is an Indian contemporary and choreographer, who employs his training in Indian classical dance forms of Kathak as well as Kathakali to create a dance form that is unique to him, and become a pioneer of modern dance in India. Through his long and illustrious career, he has worked with various prominent performers such as Pina Bausch, Alison Becker Chase and Pink Floyd, and performed in many parts of the world. He has been awarded the Sangeet Natak Akademi Award in 1996 and Padma Shri in 2007, awarded by the Government of India.

Astad Deboo was born in Navsari, though he grew up in Kolkata till the age of six years. Thereafter the family shifted to Jamshedpur, where father was employed with Tata Steel. His mother was a homemaker, and he has two sisters, sisters Kamal and Gulshan.

At the age of six, he started learning the Kathak dance, from the late Indra Kumar Mohanty and late Prahlad Das. He studied at Loyola School, Jamshedpur, from where he passed out in 1964, after he moved to Mumbai and joined B. com. degree from Podar College, University of Mumbai, here while pursuing his degree he happened to see the contemporary dance of the American Murray Louis Dance Company, this changed the course of his life irrevocably. Shortly after wards, Uttara Asha Coorlawala who was studying dance in New York visited Bombay, and later help Astad get admitted to Martha Graham Center of Contemporary Dance. He left Bombay 1969, on board a cargo boat that set sail from Bombay port, and later hitchhiked his way through Europe to eventually reach New York in 1974.

Over the next decade, he went to attend the London School of Contemporary Dance where he learnt Martha Graham's modern dance technique and learnt José Limón's technique in New York. He also trained with Pina Bausch in the Wuppertal Dance Company, Germany and with Alison Becker Chase of the Pilobolus Dance Company, and travelled through to Europe, Americas, Japan and Indonesia. On his return in 1977, he studied Kathakali, under Guru E. Krishna Panikar, in Thiruvalla, Kerala, where he eventually performed at the famous Guruvayur Temple.

This is an excerpt from the creation titled 'Celebration'.
Source: Wikipedia

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