Published in Alive Magazine, April 16, 2019.
When he was 8 years old, Prasanna Kasthuri would take his 5-year-old brother, Puli, to classical Indian dance lessons in his native city of Bengaluru, in southern India.
“He would learn and I would sit and watch him,” says Kasthuri, executive director of St. Louis-based Soorya Performing Arts. “One day when I came home, he was practicing and I started correcting him. I was telling him, ‘This is not right. Do this differently.’ My father watched me, and he said, ‘Are you sure you don’t want to learn to dance?’ So he put me in dance classes.”
Kasthuri remained committed to the craft, training in classical Indian dances for more than 20 years and even opening his own dance studio in India, where he taught for more than 10 years. Kasthuri came to St. Louis in 1996 to pursuit a career in IT, but it wasn’t his true passion.
“I got tired of IT because my true love was in dancing,” Kasthuri says. In 2003, with the help of family and friends, Kasthuri opened Soorya Performing Arts, a nonprofit performing arts organization “dedicated to bring an awareness, passion and interest for dance, music and theater of Indian origin.”
This weekend, Soorya Performing Arts will conduct its 11th Annual American Natya Festival. On April 19, 20 and 21, more than 150 artists from across the United States and from India will bring intricate Indian classical dance and music to audiences at the Clayton High School Auditorium.
Guided: St. Louis sat down with Kasthuri, who directs the Natya Festival, for a Q&A to learn more about its significance, its roots and what attendees can expect from this three-day dance extravaganza.
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