Starting out as a seven-year-old training intensely as a new Canadian in the classical Indian dance form Bharatnatyam to staging a cross-cultural activation of a historic site in Toronto may seem like an unlikely journey. But not if you are Nova Bhattacharya.

From Thursday through Saturday this week, Nova Dance presents Offerings at Ishpadinaa, a free outdoor show that like so many of Bhattacharya’s projects almost defies categorization. She and her dancers, her co-creators, invite you to “to witness reclamations of resistance and joy” at 285 Spadina Road, site of the Spadina Museum, formerly the mansion of financier James Austin, who purchased the land on the ridge in 1866.

Bhattacharya talks about “listening to the land” and the conversations  that went on –among the performers and creators, including dramaturge Dainty Smith, Thrasher, research intern Mushtari Afroz, Neena Jayarajan, composer/percussionist Dhaivat Jani, Ravyn Wngz, Candace Kumar and herself — as a truth and reconciliation process. But not just between Indigenous peoples and everyone else, but among all who have experienced colonialism and its attendant suppression of cultures.

Dance, the universal language, as she points out, is a way to not just be on the earth together, but an act of unearthing long ago uses of the land. “The Mississaugas of the Credit River used have gatherings there,” says Bhattacharya. The space is also associated with the arrival of immigrant populations, including African Americans, and of course with the British colonial administration of Upper Canada.

A dancer, choreographer and teacher, Bhattacharya recalls the dawning of her awareness of a common colonial past from an early childhood visit to Kolkata (Calcutta) where her family came from. “The architecture that I saw there was very similar to the architecture I saw in Canada,” in Halifax, where she was born and Toronto where she grew up. Because of course the buildings all bore the stamp of the British Empire.

Nova Dance is enjoying a year of performing in public spaces. In July at Quebec’s Furies contemporary dance festival in the Haute-Gaspésie region, Bhattacharya gave two performances of her solo Love Becomes Her on the shores of the St. Lawrence River – at 10 o’clock in the morning. Nothing says rooted more than dancing in a wet, rocky shoreline.

She says her 10 years of Butoh training is coming to the fore in such performances. Next up is a work that will take place around the Colonial Building in St. John’s Newfoundland, where she was teaching last year. The physical act of walking the steep inclines of the city was inspiring, in the feedback it was giving her body. As she explored the history of the buildings, she learned that the city  had entered into conversations with the Indigenous communities who insisted on keeping the name, “because it’s the truth. That’s what truth and reconciliation is about.”

Having become an independent dancer at 16 and forming Nova Dance in 2008, Bhattacharya has covered a lot of ground and earned labels from bad-ass to boundary-breaking. It seems she was born to explore, experiment and collaborate. From her early days dancing with fellow students of Menaka Thakkar, she was investigating other contemporary forms.

She began choreographing in 1997 and was soon performing with Peggy Baker Dance Projects, Compagnie Flak and Fujiwara Dance Inventions. The late Tedd Robinson created wonderful pieces for Nova Dance. As a choreographer Bhattacharya made ground-breaking dances in collaboration with Louis Laberge-Côté, among others. And how do these collaborations across disparate, dance disciplines work, one asks. “Dance is the first language, in a way. It’s gesture. If we really communicate with each other, from a place of parity and respect for each other, it’s absolutely possible to get to a cohesive artistic expression.”

In that regard it’s possible to see Svāhā! her epic piece for 22 dancers first performed in 2021 as a culmination of all that Nova Dance has been striving for. The work embodies 29 dance forms and is a realization of dance as story, ritual and transformation. But it is certainly not the finale for Nova Dance.

Offerings at Ishpadinaa

Produced by Nova Dance

5:30 to 6:30 pm, August 29 through 31, 2024

285 Spadina Rd, Toronto

Free admission

Photo of Nova Bhattacharya by Jack Udashkin