Malavika Sarukkai, a passionate, path-breaking artist from India, has contributed a significant and eclectic body of work, making her mark as one who imaginatively reworks tradition. Her choreography embodies originality, intelligence, mastery of technique and a vitalized movement vocabulary, to inventively relate the world of dance to the world around us.
With an artistic ambition stretching from narrative to figurative to purely abstract, Malavika Sarukkai has innovated boldly – adding several dimensions and interpretations to her choreography for over three decades. Her collaborative productions have synergised dialogues with poets, musicians, painters, art historians and contemporary writers. Over the years, she has added exceptional group choreographies to her repertoire – Vamatara -- to The Light, based on Pichwai paintings and the abstract concept of Thari-The Loom, inspired by the handloom weavers of India.
Malavika Sarukkai is a firm believer in tradition and change. Her choreographic interpretations extend the boundaries of Bharatanatyam to reveal the incandescent beauty of the classical language of dance and the energised articulation of a contemporary mind.
In the last few years, her creative impulse has focused on exploring conflicts of the human condition. Inspired by this central idea, she choreographed The Battle Within, which is a creative retelling in dance of one of India’s most revered texts, The Bhagvad Gita, where Arjuna, the warrior, faces an existential crisis as he dialogues with Krishna. Her latest dance creation, Anubandh – Connectedness, looks at the complex web of the human condition and is a contemporary comment on our lives.
Malavika Sarukkai continues to blaze a trail with thought provoking productions in the dance firmament, making her a legendary artist whose distinctive and meditative quality of dance continues to impact generations of dancers and dance enthusiasts.
A renowned artist with an international reputation, Malavika Sarukkai has inaugurated and performed in major festivals in India and abroad. In an illustrious career spanning several decades her work is celebrated by critics, connoisseurs and the general public for its artistic interpretation and excellence.
Malavika Sarukkai’s choreographies Sthiti Gati and Krishna Nee are included in the core repertoire of the Juilliard Creative Classroom Resources in New York.
Her exceptional artistry has been filmed by NFDC in India, the BBC, German TV and the French Arte Channel. More recently, the personal and searching film, The Unseen Sequence, directed by Sumantra Ghosal and premiered at The Lincoln Center, has received exceptional reviews both nationally and internationally.
Malavika Sarukkai has received many awards and accolades. Among them are the Padmashri from the President of India in 2003, the Central Sangeet Natak Akademi Award 2002, Kalaimamani from the Government of Tamilnadu in 1994, Natya Kala Acharya for 2017 from The Music Academy, Chennai.