Dance Little Lady

I was wondering what started my love affair with dance the other day. I adore theatre and love the literate playwright but given the option I will always run towards anything that has dance before words. I wondered what aspect of my childhood set me along this path and realised it certainly wasn't my parents or sister. My mother would weep with boredom at the sight of anything en pointe, my father believed the only real form of performance was a  opera and my sister shakes with laughter at the sight of Darcy Bussell.

I think it must be something to do with monkeys, snakes and puppets. The traditional children's party entertainment when I was a small baba came in three forms: monkey dancers, snake charmers and Rajastani puppets. All three involved movement and music and needed no dialogue to make them thrilling. I think that must be where it came from - that and reading the life stories of Isadora Duncan and Anna Pavlova at ten.

My favourites when I was small were always the monkey men with their brightly garbed, ineffably sad monkeys who would dance to the beat of a drum and seemed to be at once slightly dangerous and unbelievably sweet. The snake charmers with their pipes and hooded cobras sinuously dancing to the charmed music always terrified me - I was never convinced that the snakes were safe and had the beginnings of what is now a major snake phobia. The Rajput puppets were always a strong second favourite with their jerky dance and bright colours. They would slide down the list when I would try to make them dance for me and end up with mish mash of string, puppet and splintery wooden marionette controls.

As I got older I realised how terribly sad the monkeys truly were - forced to prance in time to the relentless drum and chained together in an enforced intimacy - no wonder they would occasionally snap and attack unwary children. The snakes grew more alarming as the phobia began to reach its now epic proportions (that I am even able to write the word is miraculous) and the puppets were replaced by the dancers that I began to see all over the city.

The two great Indian epic dramas both are told through dance and, once I reached the beloved Miss Jagtiani and AISC, I had constant opportunities to see and learn about them.  No Bollywood movie is complete without song and dance; for me, the triumph of Slumdog Millionaire was the ending that drew the realism of the film into a magical, proper dance number. I was suddenly surrounded by dance and it was uplifting and exciting and thrilling and a language that I totally understood that transcended all old meanings and understandings.

Of course I wanted to be a dancer - from chubby ballet to fumble footed Bharatnatyam -I learned them all and was pretty awful at all of them. The advent of the sixties freed me to throw myself, Isadora like, over any number of dance floors in unbridled free form expression. I would dance to Zorba's music like a distressed maenad and strut my stuff to Marvin Gaye with no concern about the mixture of genres. I have few real regrets about my youth - it was great warts and all - and my inability to dance is no exception - I love to move and to interpret music through dance - even now.

For me the best part of teaching was the annual Rock Challenge - an extracurricular massive dance competition. I would sell it to Senior Management as anti drugs learning experience but no one involved was under any illusions - we would have done it if there had been no educational benefit. For five months I became Diaghilev ineptly choreographing, clutching my head in pain and despair as my vision was slow to be realised. I was so lucky - there always seemed to be students who would put in the hours to make that vision come to reality.

My last Rock Challenge was, appropriately, based on a Bollywood version of The Red Shoes - it was magnificent - - not because of me but because of the amazing kids who put so much effort into it. As I watched them from the wings I wept - dance does that to you in way no other art form can.