Stella Subbiah’s week of morning classes are informed by her extensive knowledge of one of the Indian classical dance forms, Bharatnatyam; the week will explore approaches to Bharatnatyam via somatics and improvisation. No previous experience of Bharatnatyam is necessary to take part.
Stella will be drawing on a wide range of references from music, dance and poetry, and asking what happens when we work with certain postures, gestures, and movements – sensorially, emotionally and mentally. What memories or images are created or conjured?
We will explore the experience of, and the relationship between, dance and the dancer and lived experiences, both real and imagined.
Stella Subbiah is teaching with ID for the first time through an invitation by Claudia Tonietto, our former Programme Coordinator.
Stella is a Bharatnatyam dancer with over thirty years’ experience as a performer, choreographer and teacher. She trained at Kalakshetra College of Fine Arts in Chennai and performed with their company for 16 years before moving to the UK in 1993. She founded the performing company and training organisation Sankalpam as co-artistic director and choreographer in 1995, researching and creating seven full-length works and shorter works under their umbrella, as well as several choreographies independently, before, during and since. Sankalpam, which received Arts Council subsidies including a period of regular funding for 15 years, was the main vehicle for her investigation of Bharatnatyam as a contemporary creative force for nearly twenty years.
She has also had considerable success as a teacher, leading Sankalpam’s training courses and summer schools, lecturing and setting up Syllabuses and courses at London School of Contemporary Dance, Erasmus Scholar at the universities of Roehampton, Groningen and Surrey, where she taught as an Associate Lecturer on the Contemporary Dance BA module.