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The Hindu : Madhu Natraj took to dancing at a very early age. With Maya Rao, noted Kathak dance exponent for a mother, Madhu “learnt dance through osmosis. I grew up in the green rooms and to the sound of music and dance. By the time I was 15, I was saturated with dance because of the politics of the art. It drove me away from the form,” says Madhu, who then studied commerce and journalism.In spite of all this she was still drawn to dance. “It is like dance chose me.” Though she has her foundation in Kathak, Madhu is more known for her creative movements and contemporary dance.“My first exposure to contemporary dance was in Delhi where I met this dancer from America who asked us to create 20 movements with just the index finger and 20 movements using just three joints in our body! That you could something like that led me back to the eternity of creativity. I returned and started training myself in choreography. I did debut as a Kathak dancer, but continued my explorations in the contemporary form.” Madhu then took off to the US to further study this style.It was during her stay there that she decided “to create something like this with our own movements, one which is based in our own roots. Then there will be Indian contemporary dance”. Madhu was back in the city with the ambition to create her own movement vocabulary and started STEM Company (Space, Time, Energy and Movement) in ’95 and later started the Natya Stem Kampni. “There was no contemporary dance company when we started, though there were some solo performers. When we got on stage, we came in for tremendous criticism, as anything new is not welcomed easily. It has been a long and lonely journey,” she recalls. Even after having travelled the world over with her contemporary dance, Madhu still returned…More