Aloka Panikar Recounts. A Great Dancer’s Story of Passion and Suffering
Abstract
In 2024, I conducted an extensive interview with Aloka Panikar in English, recording nearly six hours of conversation. Over the following two years, I transcribed the interview, had it reviewed by Aloka herself, removed the questions, added explanatory notes, and expanded on the people and places that shaped the extraordinary world of dancers – and, above all, women dancers and impresarios – who were the leading figures of the first generation of classical Indian dance-theatre in the post-Independence period. The result is a rare and, I believe, unprecedented portrait for Western readers, offering a vivid account of the Indian dance-theatre scene of the 1950s, the period that witnessed the revival of a dance tradition both millennia old and, at the same time, remarkably modern. Aloka Panikar was one of the central protagonists of this world: one of the greatest dancers of her generation, and a disciple of Guru Mayadhar Raut, himself one of the foremost masters of the Orissi tradition.
Keywords
Aloka Panikar, classic Indian dance-theatre, Orissi
Tiziana Barbiero
Tiziana Barbiero joined the Teatro tascabile di Bergamo (TTB) in 1978, at the age of seventeen. Her artistic and professional career has been closely intertwined with that of the company, where she trained under the guidance of Renzo Vescovi, its founder, artistic director, and stage director until his death in 2005. Between 1978 and 2005, she explored the three main areas of the TTB’s work: contemporary experimental theatre, outdoor theatre, and engagement with Asian performance traditions. In particular, she has devoted herself for almost fifty years to the practice of classical Indian dance-theatre in the Odissi style, which she studied under Aloka Panikar. Following Vescovi’s death, her artistic work has increasingly focused on directing.