T E S T I M O N I A L S
Your presentation and instruction was so engaging, and received eagerly by our students. The depth of your knowledge and vast experience as a artist/educator/scholar of Bharatanatyam infused each workshop and led to a widening of our student’s perspective of dance in our world... They were inspired and enlightened by your work.
- Elizabeth L. Shea, Indiana University
I consider her a cultural ambassador who instills not just passion about dance in students, but also the gravity of holistic development for a dancer. For instance, when Prathiba visits my class to talk about the history, development, performance...the entire class spontaneously erupted into clicks and floor claps. Most students identify Prathiba’s visit to the class as a life-changing, eye-opening experience. Her sense of humor, humility, and discipline make her a role model that my students look up to.
- Sue Collins, University of North Texas
It is a tall order to convey to theatre and dance students but her work not only in history but in performance working with dance students in our Department at the University of North Texas has been (and continues to be) one of the high points of their educational experience.
What Dr. Natesan does is to transform what our students read about in books into a living and breathing art form with astonishing grace and elegance. She literally opens up vistas, not only to Indian dance drama, but to Asian theatre and dance in general, which is heavily dependent on dance movement. She takes what many westerners think of as “stylization” and creates a dimensional, living art form through movement, rhythm, gesture, and facial modeling.... she moves classes of more than 100 students to become devotees of the dance in a single session. She narrates and weaves a dance with perfectly performed steps, gestures, and facial expressions that progressively becomes understandable to students who twenty minutes earlier knew absolutely nothing about Asian dance. Not only does this take extraordinary skill and concentration, but it also requires her to take the pulse of her audience while performing in order to accomplish the signature requirement of Indian dance which is to emotionally move (rasa) the audience into a higher state of mental awareness. It is not unusual for our students to end a session in what I would describe as awe and then a moment later to give Dr. Natesan a loud burst of applause and a standing ovation.
- Dr. Andrew Harris, University of North Texas