Savitha Sastry is an Indian dancer and choreographer best known as an exponent of Bharatanatyam. She is the Founder-Director of Sai Shree Arts, a Dance company known to experiment with the format of traditional Bharatanatyam by using the techniques of Bharatanatyam to showcase theme based productions based on novel stories, not based on Indian mythology or religion.
Background
Savitha Sastry was born in Hyderabad, and later lived in Mumbai before her family relocated to their home town of Chennai. She started her training in Bharatanatyam under the tutelage of Guru Mahalingam Pillai at the Sri Rajarajeswari Bharatha Natya Kala Mandir in Mumbai, and later with Adyar K Lakshman and the Dhananjayans in Chennai. She did her schooling from the P.S Senior Secondary School in Chennai, and her graduation from the Stella Maris College. In 1986, she featured as the lead dancer in the Tamil film Ananda Tandavam, a production of her Guru Adyar K Lakshman. She pursued her Masters degree in the United States, where she majored in Neuroscience.
Career
Through the 80s, 90s and the first decade of the millennium, Savitha had performed mostly to traditional repertoires of Bharatanatyam. She produced and choreographed a few full length presentations such as Krishna: The Supreme Mystic and Purushartha during this phase. Savitha was credited to have a high degree of technical proficiency to her kinetics of the dance form in being able to deliver it with grace and technique demanded of Bharatanatyam performers.
Savitha has been critically lauded not only for her technique, but also for her innovations with the art form to take it to a wider audience. Critc Fozia Yasin of the Asian Age notes that Savitha "aims to bring about a renaissance in the traditional art form by marrying the aesthetics of Bharatanatyam with the power of an intelligent and novel story-line."
By 2009, Savitha departed from performing traditional margams (the traditional order in which classical dance is performed), and started her work on theme based productions. Savitha is noted for the use of contemporary and original story lines in her performances and her portrayal of multiple characters as a solo performer in them, which is a marked departure from the traditional Bharatanatyam theme of the nayika (the heroine) pining for love or pieces based on Bhakti (devotion) alone. Some of her notable productions include Music Within (2010), Soul Cages (2012) and Yudh (2013).
All her productions have been based on short stories by her husband AK Srikanth, and the soundtrack for the productions have been composed by Rajkumar Bharathi, the great grandson of the veteran poet Subramania Bharathi. These have been performed in several countries, and the productions have met with critical and popular acclaim. Savitha has been given the epithet of 'Dancing Storyteller' by the popular press following these productions. Following the acclaim of her last production Yudh, Savitha is now working on her next production titled The Prophet, also written by Srikanth.