Welcome aboard!
May 2016
Life Positive is honoured and delighted to announce that the renowned Kathak maestro Padmashri Dr Shovana Narayan has joined our advisory board.
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There are so many facets to Dr Narayan that it seems impossible to believe that it all applies to one person. She is an outstanding dancer, a scholar, a researcher, an ex-civil servant, a revered Kathak guru and choreographer, a physicist and a humanitarian! Lovingly addressed as Guru Shovana Narayan, she is acclaimed as the most celebrated and outstanding Kathak maestro, choreographer and performer in the country today. Her career, spanning several decades, has seen her mesmerising audiences all over the world in several prestigious national and international festivals. She has worked in international collaborations with leading dancers of Western classical ballet, Spanish flamenco, and tap dance. She has also produced beautiful pieces of arts on the works of philosophers in collaboration with Prof Ramchandra Gandhi (grandson of Mahatma Gandhi) as well as on soliloquys creating new paradigms of artistic expression. Her deep-rooted concern for humanity, society, environment, health, and women and child issues have seen her as a passionate speaker and silent activist at various platforms. This has also been visible in her dance works since the ’70s.
Extremely versatile, she not only holds two MPhil degrees _ Defence and Strategic Studies, and Social Sciences and Public Administration _ but she is also a Masters in Physics. She has been the first person to balance two parallel professional careers, one as a very senior civil servant (IAS, 1976 batch), and as the nationally awarded classical dancer of the country – Padmashri in 1992 and Sangeet Natak Akademi in 1999-2000 among a host of other national and international awards. She has written 10 volumes on Indian dance and culture, which bespeak her intensity, depth and gravity. She has also guided research students towards PhD in the field of dance.
We welcome Dr Shovana Narayan and hope to benefit hugely from her multifaceted personality.