educator Hema Rajagopalan. The highly innovative work of NDT offers profound and subtle expressions of humanity's deepest questions and values in the context of our present-day lives. NDT's contemporary style uses dynamic body movement, rhythmic footwork, hand gestures and facial expressions to convey meaning and emotion to create rasa, the aesthetic experience that transforms the audience. This style is rooted in Bharata
Natyam, one of the great classical dance forms of India. A principal goal of NDT is to use dance as a means of cultural exchange. This is accomplished by means of a 32-year-old dance school, a touring company that performs throughout the country and abroad, an outreach program, and a series of presentations featuring the finest Indian performing artists of various
genres.
It is at the core of our mission to preserve and perpetuate Bharata Natyam in all its classical rigor while moving the art form in innovative directions. Our movement vocabulary is not static. One of the great things about being in a dynamic, diverse and creative city like Chicago is that we benefit from contact with so many extraordinary artists and so many different art forms and traditions. Collaboration gives us a way to explore new dynamics of our dance style and move across cultural boundaries. Through our work in dance, music and theater, we have discovered the similarities
that bind members of the human family. We have come to appreciate the diverse forms of beauty that surround us...the beauty of the universe, the world, people.
Over the course of the past 32 years, audiences and critics worldwide have recognized the artistic excellence of NDT. In 2005, it was the first US company ever to appear at the prestigious World Music Institute in New York City. The New York Times hailed the performance as "admirably precise, animated, sensual, exceptional, triumphant, daring." Last year, NDT performed with cellist Yo-Yo Ma and the Silk Road Ensemble before an audience of 13,000 at Chicago's Millennium Park. It has appeared at Chicago's Museum of Contemporary Art, McAninch Arts Center at College of DuPage, and nationally and internationally at Lincoln Center for the Performing Arts, the Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts, Ravinia Festival, the Smithsonian in Washington DC, the Avignon Festival in France, and the Music & Dance Festival in Madras, India, among other major venues. NDT is a six-time recipient of the Chicago Reader "Critic's Choice." In 2003, it was the first Indian dance company to receive the prestigious Chicago Dance Award. NDT is also a 2004 recipient of the Paul Berger Arts Entrepreneurship Award from Columbia College Chicago. And in April 2005, NDT was featured in The Chicago Dance Project, a thirteen-part series produced by PBS.
NDT undertook groundbreaking collaborations with
the Chicago Symphony Orchestra in 2001 and 2006, and last year, collaborated with Chicago's Lookingglass Theatre Company and the Chicago Children's Choir on Sita Ram, a musical adaptation of Ramayana. Sita Ram played to capacity audiences and received wide critical acclaim, including multiple nominations for the Joseph Jefferson Award, which recognizes outstanding achievement in Chicago theater. One of these nominations went to NDT Associate Artistic Director Krithika Rajagopalan for her choreography. NDT concluded its 30th Anniversary Season in September 2006 with Dance India: Choreographing Traditions. Presented by NDT and the City of Chicago Department of Cultural Affairs, this international conference and festival combined performances, panels and workshops by world-renowned dancers, choreographers, master teachers and dance scholars. NDT's educational outreach encompasses numerous schools, museums and social service organizations throughout greater Chicago such as Apna Ghar (Our Home), which provides services to women who have suffered abuse and their children. For the past five years, NDT has conducted an arts teaching residency in Chicago Public Schools.