REVIEW --THE DAILY CAMERA
BOULDER
COLORADO

Dances of the Divine
Boulder performer returns for one-woman
show
By Cari Cunningham, Camera Dance
Critic
June 23, 2005
Combine dancing with singing and acting and you get some version
of a musical. Add a deeply spiritual dimension and a whole
slew of ancient Hindu deities, and you get something entirely
different.
Kathak, North Indian classical dance,
is an Eastern blend of storytelling, intricate footwork,
music and song, and it is the specialty of former Boulder
resident Sharron Rose. On Friday Rose returns to Boulder
to present "Myths and Visions of Shiva and Shakti," a one-woman
show that unifies East and West, male and female, in music,
chant and dance.
Kathak shares the connection between dancer and the divine
that is found in Bharatanatym (another form of Indian classical
dance), but differs from this dance form in its highly improvisational
nature.
"Kathak is completely improvisational," Rose
says. "It has an incredible base in structure and rhythm
and expression ... but it really has to do with the energy
of the audience ... and so each time you do it it can be
different."
"For a Western person, I think, it's
easier to learn," Rose adds, although her 27 years of training
in the form belie this claim.
What she lacks in actual Indian bloodline,
Rose makes up for in passion and research. Originally a
student of Western performance (she began dancing as soon
as she could walk and studied various forms of theater,
as well as ballet and opera), her college years brought
the opportunity for a synthesis of performative and spiritual
energies.
"I went to college in '66 in Washington,
D.C., and so what was happening?" Rose asks, and then answers
her own question. "It was the feminist movement, the hippie
movement, the psychedelic movement all of that happened
at once and all of a sudden the doors were opened to the
East."
She began with yoga and meditation,
discovering within the practice "an incredible system that
was centuries older than ballet," she says. "And it seemed
also to have incredible reverence for the feminine, as
well as for the masculine. ... It was how to really work
with the tissue, being conscious of every muscle and your
alignment in a really beautiful way."
Yoga became a powerful foundation for Rose's training in various
Eastern dance forms, primarily that of Kathak North Indian
dance. It continues to inform her teaching and personal movement
practices. While in Boulder, Rose will teach a two-day workshop
combining yoga asana, meditation, chant and rhythm as a means
for accessing the divine feminine and tantric tradition.
It was a "visionary experience," according
to Rose, that led her to enroll in a dance class with the
former director of the National Dance Company of Pakistan
in the late '70s. "I saw this deity in front of me and
I started dancing, doing all the gestures and movements
of classical Indian dance although I had never seen it," Rose
says.
"When I walked into that class it
was as though I had come home," she says. "Here was a form
in which you sing, you dance and you act and every movement
that you make is deeply spiritual, every gesture has a
meaning, many meanings."
As soon as she found her calling,
Rose applied for a professional development grant from
the American Institute of Indian Studies and later a Fulbright
Senior Research Fellowship that allowed her to travel to
India to study with legendary Kathak dancer Sitara Devi.
"It all happened by what you would
call magical circumstances," Rose says of her study in
India. "I went to India and lived with my guruji Sitara
Devi, which is a very rare thing. It was just her and I
and her family and I had her all to myself in terms of
a teacher."
Besides being a devoted student of
Indian classical dance, Rose also has published a book, "The
Path of the Priestess; A Guidebook for Awakening the Divine
Feminine," and recently created her own DVD, "Yoga of Light." She
is currently working on the reconstruction of ancient Egyptian
temple dance, among other projects.
"There is a grace, a radiance that
exists in these in these ancient traditions that is lost,
almost," she says, a hint of sadness mingling with her
incredible passion for learning and preserving this knowledge. "Dance
is an incredible form of transmission."
Copyright 2005, Boulder Publishing LLC
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