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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