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  • 1 year ago
It's the highlight of many Divali events, seeing bedazzled dancers on stage, flowing from one interpretive move to another. Devotional Indian dance is what some live for, like the owner of the Woodland Dance Academy, Shalene Surujbally who left her nine to five day job to dive, or should we say, dance right in.

Transcript
00:00Dance was always in Shaleen Suraj Bali's DNA.
00:18I've been dancing since the age of four, but my family has been more into culture than
00:25anything else, and they have been going to Ramayana, and I am from actually a pandit family
00:31home, so I think the best way for me to actually stay into the culture, my mom made sure that I
00:39continued dancing. She would leave work every day, then head off to the dance academy she started in
00:452017. But the time came for her to contemplate a life-changing decision. And I actually found
00:53that time where the academy was growing, and I had to make a decision whether
00:58I'm going to focus on corporate or I'm going to do dance. And
01:04someone told me, you have to make a decision. And with that decision, it's a risk-taking decision,
01:12but it's actually worth it, and it's going to be worth it because they saw
01:16merit in what I was doing. The Woodland Dance Academy is her way of giving back to her community
01:22and today, Shaleen has no regrets. Starting off with Woodland Dance Academy with two students,
01:29and now I actually have a little over 100 students with seven branches. It has been worth it.
01:38Some months are down, some months are up, but I mean, we still have the culture going.
01:43Shaleen has some very strict rules at her academy, like ensuring dancers are fully covered
01:49and treating the string of bells around the ankles with respect.
01:54The kangaroo on my foot, right, it's very sacred. All my dancers are not allowed to eat meat
02:01when they have to wear this, meat, eggs, anything. They have to be fully veg,
02:05right, so vegetarian on that day. When we're wearing our kangaroos,
02:10we don't wear a slipper. It's a disrespect because a kangaroo is a very sacred thing.
02:14There is so much that goes into the three-minute dance you see on stage.
02:22So preparing for Diwali performance takes, let's say, three to four hours a dancer would take to
02:30get dressed, and it usually takes my senior class two months max to learn a performance.
02:39With her two senior dancers, Sahily Mongaroo and Alyssa Rampersad, Shaleen shows us one of
02:44the movements symbolic of Mother Lakshmi, the lotus flower on which she stands.
02:50So you're going to put your hands like this. This is the left, this is the right,
02:56and you're going to do this. This is the lotus closed, and this is the lotus open.
03:03Shaleen prays before and after each dance,
03:06keeping dear to her heart the reason she does what she does.
03:11Trying my hardest with the young ones to actually keep them in the culture.
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