By Sejal Mehta

A Kathak dancer par excellence, New York based Amrapali Ambegaonkar gives the extremely over- rated concept of fusion a fresh stance.

She certainly looks the part — big, luminous eyes and hands that gesture with a dancer’s grace. There is an enthusiasm about Amrapali Ambegaonker that betrays an energetic spirit, one that is just raring to go. She delighted audiences when she danced to our very own Sanjay Leela Bhansali’s magnum opus ‘Devdas’ and Mani Ratnam’s new film at the Palms Springs International Film Festival.

What’s That Word?
“I hate the word fusion. It is completely misunderstood,” she states. So what does it mean to her? “It’s all about a performer’s vision and what they want to experiment with.” Amrapali studied the Flamenco dance and fell in love with its contrast to the dynamism of Kathak. So she studied it and created variations on the basic Kathak structure.

How? “I took the elements of contemporary dance and merged them with Flamenco, so no one could separate one from the other,” she explains. For her, the aspect of consciously getting into fusion dancing hadn’t even been an issue.

“To me, the crossover was so obvious. It was just something that came from within. I always wanted to take the dance to another level by breaking the mould.” And she certainly has, going by the variations she has achieved with music and dance. “Oh, I’ve done gypsy dances, Titanic themes, tap dancing,” she grins. In fact, she was recently invited to a festival in Toronto where she danced to the music from ‘Kamasutra’.

Into Mom’s Dancing Shoes
Amrapali trained under her mother, Anjani Ambegaonker, a trained Kathak dancer, who moved to America 25 years ago and established the Kathak Dance of India Company there. Amrapali’s life was filled with dance right from the beginning, so it was very natural for her to follow her mother onto the stage.

“I started doing festivals and shows with mom when I was 11 and would miss upto six weeks of school,” she recalls. She eventually became the principal dancer of her mother’s dance company at 13. But she didn’t take Kathak too seriously till she was in college, by which time, she was majoring in it. It was then that her mother saw some real potential in her dance and the two started thinking about dance as something she could pursue as a career.

Well, after that, she finished her BA from University of California, Los Angeles, in World Art and Culture and ever since, life has been a whirlwind of shows, cultures, training, interviews and countless enriching experiences.

She was one of the two finalists at the Music Center Spotlight Awards in 1995 — to date the only Indian dancer to have received this honour. Apart from her solo tours and fusion dances, she assists her mother in her dance company, where they impart the richness of traditional Kathak to people abroad.

Dance – A Mission