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They skip food for Odissi

Correspondent

It's a wonderful harmony of yoga and dance

BHUBANESWAR: Forty two-year-old Odissi dance teacher Olga Fomina and her disciple Tatiana Portnova from Russia have skipped most of their meals over the past five days to watch as many performances as they can in the ongoing international Odissi dance festival here.

For the past seven years, Revital from Israel has been toiling hard as a yoga teacher in Arizona along with her husband to earn money to come to Orissa for a better understanding of Odissi dance. And for Jamie Lynn from USA, a researcher on gender studies, a trip to Orissa to see and learn Odissi in its land of origin has been a dream come true.

Tatiana, Revital and Jamie are not the few who are quite crazy about Odissi. There are at least 50 such foreign dancers, leave apart the scores of NRIs, from 15 countries in this five-day festival who too share a similar passion for this oriental dace form.

What lures them to sacrifice their comfortable lives and better career opportunities back home to pursue a passion for an alien dance form? "Odissi is a confluence of Indian culture and spiritualism.

My mother's spiritual guru was from India and it was my mother who introduced me to Indian civilisation.

As a student of Odissi, I could experience the Indian way of life and I love it indeed," revealed Amanda Geroy from California, whose portrayal of the character of Hanuman left the audience spellbound.

Revital too seeks spiritual bliss in Odissi that she finds as "a wonderful harmony of yoga and dance".

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