16 days: Parijat is the bomb

Update: Parijat Desai is now teaching a beginning workshop in Indian Classical Dance in New York, using a contemporary approach. Register online now!

Parijat also offers intermediate classes. In Spring 2009, she'll be in residence at Stanford's Institute of Diverse Arts.

I used to yearn after dance the way you yearn after heat in the depths of a New York winter. In my next lifetime, I said, I will be a dancer. In this one, I'll settle for poetry.

Now I'm shifting. Working with Parijat on Migritude is opening me up in so many ways. To watch her take my words into her body, integrate them, and then unfurl compelling movement that brings new torrents of words out of me, is every bit as satisfying and joyful as I ever imagined it would be to dance myself. And so much less work :-)

That's the second lesson I'm learning from her. I don't have the discipline, the tenacity, the sheer physical determination, to be a dancer. To put in the years of training it's taken her to achieve this virtuosity. To do the daily maintenance - workouts, dance classes, painstaking warmups - that the body requires to be an instrument for dance.

But oh - the moments when it comes together in rehearsal. My words, her dance, the energy of the work. The whole studio quivers and vibrates. I want everyone in the world to see it, feel it, right now.