Meet a performing artist in India and chances are that she will mention how long she has trained. A figure that makes for at least one decade is de rigueur; more than one is even better. Dance training, especially in Indian classical styles, is very keenly regulated by calculations

where knowledge acquired is proportional to the numerical quality of the investment — in time, and sometimes, money. A dancer’s worth is measured on stage, but also established by setting details out for scrutiny — be it the length of a dance piece, the hours spent in rehearsal or the years spent learning.
Given this penchant for number-crunching, what role do dance workshops play? In summer, advertisements for dance workshops alluringly flash on the pages of dance websites. Workshops are usually short and intense capsules of learning. They might introduce one to a new style or focus on extending a dancer’s grasp over a previously learnt technique. In classical dance, they often augment a dancer’s repertoire. Workshops are a key learning tool for people who live outside India or in cities where they cannot find quality teachers in a particular dance style. It is also common for established performers to travel abroad and conduct workshops for their students. Cultural organisations abroad may also create and institutionalise short-term dance training programmes; for instance, Milapfest’s Dance India workshops in the UK.
Kuchipudi dancer Vyjayanthi Kashi, the artistic director of Shambhavi School of Dance, organises a series of workshops called Celebrate Dance, where she invites dancers of different styles to conduct short workshops. “The concept of learning under a single guru and perfecting a form was good, but times have changed. We now express more concrete distinctions in style, which many ancient texts did not do. It helps to experience the similarities and differences between dance styles. To know your form better, one has to be aware of other forms too,” she explains.
Workshops are approachable avenues for people who are otherwise not exposed to dance training due to a paucity of time, money or confidence. Today’s workshops are not just by-products of a maniacal urban atmosphere where activities must be compressed even as time stretches itself.
Odissi dancer Kumkum Lal offers a historical perspective on the emergence of workshops, especially in her dance style. She recounts, “My teacher Kelucharan Mohapatra would come to Delhi to conduct workshops in the summer in the 1960s. Even in Orissa, the workshops he conducted were called condensed courses, and they were aimed at fulltime students of Odissi who studied a set course of dance pieces at the university. The classes began in the morning and ended at night. It was never an ‘item-oriented’ method of learning. But when he started teaching in Bombay, there were students whose first experience of Odissi was through those workshops. Though they were learning complex pieces, the training was so thorough that they absorbed the nuances of the style in a short period of time. Once the workshop ended, they found it difficult to adjust to other teachers to continue their training for the rest of the year. So there emerged a group of dancers who trained chiefly at the workshops they attended.”
From her account, one could construe that the workshop became a conspicuous pedagogical tool when dance moved beyond region-specific hubs. As early as the 1940s, classical dance gurus would travel to cities like Mumbai to live with families and teach dance to the women. In time, the students would also travel to the home states of their teachers to learn about the history of the dance and for advanced training. So dancers would travel to Cuttack, Thanjavur, Manipur or Kuchipudi village to train under their gurus and return home to perform, and perhaps teach.
Kashi points to her workshop series as a space to discuss senior dancers’ experiences of guru-shishya parampara, introducing students to ways of learning which they don’t normally experience, since a lot of current dance training revolves around “items” and short one-hour classes.
Jayachandran Palazhy, director of Attakkalari, says that one cannot maintain totalitarian views on the relevance of workshops. “They serve a limited purpose, but they can be very useful. A workshop might introduce you to a new technique or process. Workshops are not standalone pedagogical tools but they give you access to a new domain. They are almost like accessing a book using its introduction or through a review; those processes cannot replace reading the book.”
Lal concurs, “The workshop is one of the exigencies of being in the modern world and not being able to find the time to learn at a leisurely pace. For training, it is great to dance the whole day, but one should never be in a rush to go through workshops just to learn new things. The workshop process coils learning very tightly; a little slack can make the process unravel rapidly.”
Is the guru now a conglomerate? Workshops are but one component of a metamorphosing dance scene where identities seem more fluid. Increasingly, dancers might train with more than one teacher, and at times, under several teachers, to get fresh perspectives on their style and to absorb the best of all worlds. “In places like India it is impossible to learn all those styles, let alone forms from elsewhere in the world. But an awareness of these languages informs the choices you make,” Palazhy says.