Contemporary dancer Nejla Yatkin’s New Year’s Eve party kicked off in Hyderabad. “I saw the Hyderabadi way of celebrating; it was fun,” she says with a laugh. The Chicago-based dancer was in the city to conduct a two-day workshop organised by city-based Feet on Earth dance studio and reminisces how she grew up watching Bollywood movies. “My parents are from Turkey and would live in Germany. Bollywood movies were big in Turkey. It was déjà vu at the New Year’s party and we were improvising the steps and dancing.”
Nejla’s has been a life of dance and her new project ‘Dancing Around the World’ has taken her across the countries. “I wanted to go around the world teaching specific works and expose dance to people who can’t afford to go to the theatre. I wanted to put it in public spaces so that people can see it, get used to it and appreciate it,” she states. Since April ’15, she has been travelling across the world. Ask her about the first city she went to and Nejla quips, “From Chicago, we went to Bogota and Medellin to Columbia. We took up two cities because have been touring the place for the past 8 years,” she says and recounts the names of all the places she has been to. “I worked for one year to plan all the places; I have the tour in my head,” she says with a smile.
Dancers across the globe follow different styles and she observes, “Dancers have their own movements depending on the way they live; the way street life is; traffic is. Everything influences you and in turn influences on the body how it is moving. For example, in Bogota, everybody is stressed and the energy of dancers is little more as it is dangerous moving through the city and traffic is very congested and they spend a lot of time waiting. Through the workshop, we changed the energy and people started trusting. Medellin is more like a protective city and people were more relaxed and friendly because it is surrounded by mountains so it has a little bit of womb-like energy. And, in Lima, dancers were relaxed and laidback because they don’t have that cold history of Columbia.”
Talking about Hyderabad dancers, Nejla says, “Dancers are new to contemporary dancing. I am teaching the basics of contemporary dancing and hopefully we get something out of them and I am teaching a basic set of techniques and also let them explore technique on their own and improvise so that it is more like a dialogue.”
Nejla’s performances have been widely appreciated with critics raving about the ‘magic on stage.’ “I try to create a magical atmosphere. When you create a dance combining all elements – a part of story telling, lights, costume and music, and video projection and the dance too it is to tell a whole story like a moving painting on stage.”
Although ‘the beginnings were not easy,’ Nejla affirms the journey was quite fun. “Since I started dancing, I have put myself totally into it and performing in different stages not just upper houses but also gallery spaces, prisons, black box theatres and expose dance into bigger variety because concert stage is limited. And, not everybody can go there (to a concert).”
Nejla talks about going back to Chicago and creating a documentary about the whole tour. “We are creating short videos for each country but we also wanted to do a documentary about what moves people and also show the commonalities of people and the essence of why people dance is same around the world even though the styles are different.”
