Astad Deboo
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A brief biography
Sharmila Ganesan, December 11, 2020: The Times of India
Legendary choreographer and Padma Shri awardee Astad Deboo — created a unique Indian contemporary dance vocabulary and loving yet firm instruction to his dancers that, “If it doesn’t kill you, it’s no good”.
Born into a Parsi family on the brink of India’s independence in Navsari, Gujarat, Deboo began to train in kathak under Prahlad Das in Kolkata and in kathakali under E K Pannicker. But finding the styles too restrictive, he boarded a cargo ship with a backpack and sat next to goats and sheep to explore international dance forms and, over time, collaborated with other styles from Indonesia and Japan to reach a stage where every Deboo show promised an innovation.
Slowly, the unitards were replaced by flared dhotis and long, layered homespun angarkhas that created aesthetic illusions as he spun and bent gracefully onstage. Deboo also forayed into other disciplines, like cinema, choreographing for directors such as Mani Ratnam, Vishal Bhardwaj and legendary painter M F Hussain for his film “Meenaxi: A Tale of Three Cities”
In the mid-2000s, when Deboo performed with his troupe of deaf dancers in the Rashtrapati Bhavan, then president APJ Abdul Kalam was moved to tears and offered to serve the deaf performers dinner himself.
