Nrtyakala Academy, North York, ON

Dr. Menaka Thakkar, an internationally renowned and multi-honoured dancer, choreographer, teacher and institution builder has been a leader in Indian dance in Canada for the past 42 years, where she has created a whole generation of Indian dancers across Canada in the classical systems of Bharatanatyam and Odissi. As a choreographer, she has created a large number of original works and successfully experimented with new form, movement and dance vocabulary, thus making fundamental contributions to the development of neoclassical and contemporary forms of Indian dance. Her own performances have ranged internationally over a large number of cities and countries in a brilliant fifty-year performing career. She is the founder-director of two most influential institutions of Indian dance in Canada.
Forty two years ago she founded the first school of Indian dance, Nrtyakala, the Canadian Academy of Indian Dance. Five years later, she founded the first professional company of Indian dance called Menaka Thakkar Dance Company, and became the leading voice for getting the funding support opened up for Indian dance companies from the Canada Council for the Arts. In 1993 she received an honourary doctorate (D.Litt) from York University and was made an Adjunct Professor of Dance at York University. She has been teaching at her school Nrtyakala – Canadian Academy of Indian Dance, the York University Dance Department, and at Canada’s National Ballet School in Toronto. In addition to a large number of original choreographic works in Bharatanatyam and Odissi, she was the first to collaborate with several Canadian dance artists to create a large body of fusion choreography as part of her continuing effort to contribute to
the development of contemporary choreography in Indian dance. Menaka’s own training in Bharatanatyam began at the age of four with older sister Sudha Thakkar Khandwani (1946–1953) in the Kalakshetra style.