The Joy of Dance

“The modern-day labels of Hindu and Muslim are much more complex than those terms signify,” Nimjee says. “As a curious scholar, I am interested in the places in between, the frictions, and what culture and performance mean to people.”

Kathak, Nimjee says, is an art form that’s been molded by the changing nature of its performers—Hindu, Muslim, men, women, members of the transgender community—as well as by changes in performances and audiences over time. The result, she says, is a “grammar rather than a vocabulary” that can tell a variety of stories and express universal emotions: love, lust, sadness, joy.

The dance is said to have originated in ancient times as a storytelling device for traveling bards recounting the great Hindu epics, the Mahabharata and the Ramayana. When the Mughal emperors—generous patrons of the arts—ruled the northern part of the Indian subcontinent from the mid-1500s to the mid-1700s, court entertainers choreographed dances to poems and music that fused Indo-Islamic cultures. Kathak dancers performed for both Muslim Nawabs and Hindu Maharajas. Today, Kathak is integral to Indian contemporary dance, which melds Indian classical dance with folk styles and other Western dance genres.

Nimjee has been interested in the arts since she was a child: She began playing the piano at age 4, and she majored in classical piano performance at University of Toronto. She first encountered Kathak in a college class called Introduction to Music and Society. The instructor was an expert in the tabla, a pair of hand drums whose beats set the rhythm for Kathak dancers—“and that ignited something in me,” Nimjee says. “I was hooked, I needed to have it in my body, I needed to learn it.” A Google search of “Kathak” and “Toronto” led her to the studio of Joanna de Souza, one of the first students of the late Pandit Chitresh Das, who brought Kathak to North America in the early 1970s. Nimjee loved dancing so much and worked so hard at it that within a few years, she began performing with de Souza and her troupe, excelling in spontaneous composition and choreography while delving further into Kathak and other South Asian performing arts. She researched contemporary Indian dance for her doctorate at The University of Chicago.

The classes that Nimjee teaches at Puget Sound—informed both by her scholarship and by her years of dance performance—are premised in the notion that South Asian performing arts are not static, that they’re vibrant, ever changing—both inside the region and outside. South Asia is a huge place, and the global South Asian diaspora is also very large, she says, so it’s tough to cover every aspect of the performing arts. But Nimjee offers her students glimpses into as wide an array as she can, including in her courses case studies on the diversity of music in Nepal; the evolution of Bharatanatyam, the classical dance of South India, in Sri Lanka; and the influence of traditional South Asian music genres on carnival music in the Caribbean; among others. One of her favorite case studies is Coke Studio Pakistan, the country’s longest-running live TV music show that brings together artists who mix traditional South Asian Islamic music forms with hip-hop, rock, and jazz.

“In all my courses, I also try to contextualize current events—movements around gender, queer identities, race, politics, and social change—through performance,” she says, “and to start a dialogue on the importance of culture in our lives and what performance can tell us about the world we live in.”

Nimjee is still dancing, of course—she takes lessons twice weekly via Zoom with her teacher in Toronto. And she continues to develop new choreography, working with her husband, Matthew DelCiampo, adjunct professor of musicology and ethnomusicology. Like Nimjee, DelCiampo is interested in the different ways that culture shapes performance— and performance shapes culture.