Kathak music remix tv#

Kathak music remix tv#

One of her favorite case studies is Coke Studio Pakistan, the countryвЂ™s longest-running live TV music show that brings together artists who mix traditional South Asian Islamic music forms with hip-hop, rock, and jazz.

But Nimjee offers her students glimpses into as wide an array as she can, including in her courses case studies on the diversity of music in Nepal the evolution of Bharatanatyam, the classical dance of South India, in Sri Lanka and the influence of traditional South Asian music genres on carnival music in the Caribbean among others. South Asia is a huge place, and the global South Asian diaspora is also very large, she says, so itвЂ™s tough to cover every aspect of the performing arts. The classes that Nimjee teaches at Puget Sound-informed both by her scholarship and by her years of dance performance-are premised in the notion that South Asian performing arts are not static, that theyвЂ™re vibrant, ever changing-both inside the region and outside. She researched contemporary Indian dance for her doctorate at The University of Chicago. Nimjee loved dancing so much and worked so hard at it that within a few years, she began performing with de Souza and her troupe, excelling in spontaneous composition and choreography while delving further into Kathak and other South Asian performing arts. вЂњI was hooked, I needed to have it in my body, I needed to learn it.вЂќ A Google search of вЂњKathakвЂќ and вЂњTorontoвЂќ led her to the studio of Joanna de Souza, one of the first students of the late Pandit Chitresh Das, who brought Kathak to North America in the early 1970s. The instructor was an expert in the tabla, a pair of hand drums whose beats set the rhythm for Kathak dancers-вЂњand that ignited something in me,вЂќ Nimjee says. She first encountered Kathak in a college class called Introduction to Music and Society. Nimjee has been interested in the arts since she was a child: She began playing the piano at age 4, and she majored in classical piano performance at University of Toronto. Today, Kathak is integral to Indian contemporary dance, which melds Indian classical dance with folk styles and other Western dance genres. Kathak dancers performed for both Muslim Nawabs and Hindu Maharajas. When the Mughal emperors-generous patrons of the arts-ruled the northern part of the Indian subcontinent from the mid-1500s to the mid-1700s, court entertainers choreographed dances to poems and music that fused Indo-Islamic cultures.

The dance is said to have originated in ancient times as a storytelling device for traveling bards recounting the great Hindu epics, the Mahabharata and the Ramayana. The result, she says, is a вЂњgrammar rather than a vocabularyвЂќ that can tell a variety of stories and express universal emotions: love, lust, sadness, joy.

Kathak, Nimjee says, is an art form thatвЂ™s been molded by the changing nature of its performers-Hindu, Muslim, men, women, members of the transgender community-as well as by changes in performances and audiences over time. вЂњAs a curious scholar, I am interested in the places in between, the frictions, and what culture and performance mean to people.вЂќ вЂњThe modern-day labels of Hindu and Muslim are much more complex than those terms signify,вЂќ Nimjee says. The result is a shared wealth that, Nimjee says, is вЂњmessy but beautiful.вЂќ And, as sheвЂ™s learned through her exploration of Kathak, that wealth transcends the many boundaries, visible and invisible, that even now-almost 75 years since the partition of British India-cut deep across the region, demarcating, in particular, the ours-and-theirs between India and Pakistan, Hindus and Muslims. She keeps it next to an etching of a sura, a QurвЂ™anic verse, because to Nimjee (who is Muslim) these artifacts embody South Asia: Both the region and its many art forms are a mix of religious and cultural practices, languages, and traditions that have evolved through history. The statue has been with her since she began studying Kathak in 2006. She is every inch the dancer: graceful, poised, expressive with her hands and eyes-even though she didnвЂ™t begin dancing until she was 18.

ItвЂ™s an appropriate icon for an Indian classical dancer to own: Nimjee, assistant professor in the School of Music and the universityвЂ™s first ethnomusicologist, is trained in Kathak, an Indian classical dance form known for its crisp, rhythmic footwork and evocative storytelling through hand movements and facial gestures. On a shelf in Ameera NimjeeвЂ™s study sits a small, garlanded statue of Nataraj, the Hindu god of dance.