KALYANI JHA | NT BUZZ
Dancing has always been Poornima Karthik’s first love. And it has been a love strong enough to motivate her to fight an autoimmune disease that kept her bedridden for a few years.
Born and brought up in Mumbai, Karthik learned Odissi when she was 10 years old. While she trained as an architect, she continued to pursue dance alongside
her projects.
Besides training under guru Kelucharan Mahapatra, she has also learned through workshops with many other Odissi maestros. “There was something to learn from each of the gurus that I went to,” she says.
Her dance journey took a different turn after she attended Nritya Gram in Bengaluru, on invitation as a day scholar for a year. After she married, she moved to Bengaluru in 2012.
By then she knew she wanted to concentrate full time on dancing. “I just knew that I could not do anything else anymore. Dancing felt like a calling. So I decided to pursue it full time and started teaching and performing in Bengaluru,” she shares. This continued for almost a decade until everything changed when she was diagnosed with an autoimmune condition, rheumatoid arthritis, which made it difficult for her to dance.
“I was in a severe pain and the Bengaluru weather was not helping,” she shares. It was then that she made the decision to shift to a warmer place and eventually she moved to Goa.
Even so, she was still bedridden in her initial years in the state. “I couldn’t move. That was the biggest shock of my life. I needed help with even basic things like getting up from the bed or tying my hair,” she says.
Karthik utilised her bedridden time in researching about her condition and human psychology. “I studied about karma, read the Bhagavad Gita, prayed, chanted, learned about a healthy diet, ayurveda and panchakarma,” she says.
She also did a foundation course in expressive and creative art therapies, something that she was already acquainted and fascinated with since 2016. “There is so much research that shows that we can now change the genetic information that we store in our bodies. I think with all these learnings, I was able to change so many patterns within me,” she says, adding that it helped in her healing a lot.
“Dance was the major motivational force behind it all. I wanted to get back to dancing, to moving, because it’s so much a part of me,” she shares. She also gives credit to Vipassana for helping her.
About a year and a half ago, Karthik resumed teaching. She started with online classes for her earlier students from Bengaluru and later started doing offline classes in Goa.
“I started with about 12 to 13 students but it slowly fizzled out to only two. Learning a classical dance takes patience, dedication, discipline, and love for the art form, and it can be difficult. But I have two lovely students who have stayed with me for more than a year,” she says.
Recently, she, along with her two students performed at the Monte Music Festival as part of the performance titled ‘Samanvaya – Harmony’ by Raul- Mitali and troupe. In fact, Mitali was Karthik’s colleague in Mumbai and they both learned under the same guru. As part of the event, Karthik performed Mangalacharan with her students, and a Pallavi with Mitali and her daughter.
Karthik now hopes to reach out to more people who are interested in learning Odissi in Goa. But she advises that the earlier one begins, the easier it will be to pick up the dance form. “Learning any classical dance form takes a lot of time and effort. If you want to be a professional dancer and take up Odissi as your profession, then starting early in childhood is necessary. If you start late in life, you will still be able to perform with your guru who may involve you in some performances. But to become a solo performing artist is not easy if you start late,” she says.
Sharing about her love for teaching, Karthik says, “I love teaching because there’s so much I have learned that it’s difficult to contain it anymore. It has to be shared,” she says.
Given the personal challenges that she has overcome in her dance journey, Karthik has tried to incorporate her learnings in her teaching.
In particular, she emphasises on the warm up and cooling off time after dance for proper adaptation of one’s body for dancing. “It’s important for any Odissi dancer especially, to focus on the physical training. Cooling down is as important as warming up before,” she says. “So if you’re learning with me, you can expect a very structured class with proper warm-ups for at least 20 minutes before class and 15 to 20 minutes of cool-downs after class,”
she shares.
She also makes it a point to observe each student to be able to guide them better. “Beyond helping them understand the various movements in depth, I enjoy observing different bodies and understanding their difficulties and their strengths to be able to assist them to do their best with what they have and to incorporate different modalities to gain the strength,” she says.
