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DeliciousPandit Chitresh Das
This event is not open to the public. Admission only with Berklee ID. Event details are available to Berklee community members who sign in at berklee.net.Once a child prodigy, Pandit Chitresh Das has become one of the most dynamic and far-reaching artists to have emerged from modern India. A prolific artist, his performance, choreography, and evolution of Kathak-a classical dance of North India-has influenced the art form worldwide.
Based on his concept of innovation within tradition, Pandit Das explores the boundaries of Kathak technique and performance, creating compelling new works and techniques that are inventive, yet deeply rooted in the Kathak tradition. His innovative technique, Kathak Yoga, was recently published as the subject of a doctoral dissertation at Harvard University.
Pandit Das has also received numerous awards and grants from the Olympic Arts Festival, National Endowment for the Arts, National Dance Project, California Arts Council, Rockefeller Foundation, and Irvine Fellowships in Dance, among others. He formed the first accredited Kathak course in the U.S. at San Francisco State University. He was brought in to teach twice at the West Bengal State Academy and represented the state of Bengal in tours throughout India. He now spends a large amount of time in India performing, giving workshops, and teaching at his school, Chhandam Nritya Bharati in Calcutta.
Pandit Das ultimately sees art as a service to society and devotes time to those in need, including teaching children in the slums of India and at the Blind Opera of Calcutta, and-his most important project-teaching empowerment and self-awareness through dance to the daughters of sex workers, in partnership with the New Light Foundation in Calcutta.
Pandit Das's pioneering contribution to the American arts scene began in 1970 when he received a Whitney Fellowship through the University of Maryland to teach Kathak. In 1971 he was invited by Ustad Ali Akbar Khan to establish a Kathak dance program at the renowned Ali Akbar College of Music in California. His own school, Chhandam, founded in 1980, now has branches in California, Boston, Toronto, the Metro DC Area, Denver, Tokyo, Japan, and Kolkata and Coimbatore in India. The California school is the largest Indian classical dance school in North America.