"Junoon"
Originally an Urdu word that means passion, madness, intensity, craze and obsession.
Beauty is worth creating, celebrating and preserving.
The Russian writer, Fyodor Dostoevsky, said, “Only beauty can save the world.”
Beauty has built cities, mended broken hearts and rewritten destinies.
Beauty has the ability to grow everywhere, anywhere and at any time.
That beauty is what connects people through time and space.
That beauty frees us from suffering.
Art is beauty.
It leaves a lasting impression.
It helps us turn the corner.
JUNOON will add a little more beauty into the world. For the world is a better place when it has more beauty in it.
Art is often the privilege of a few. It shouldn't be. Just as clean air, water, shelter, clothing and full bellies don’t fall into the laps of us all, Art has been stowed away into treasure chests that are unlocked by a chosen few. Its inaccessibility is our collective embarrassment.
Art is a good thing. It does us all so much good.
Good things that do good things are a necessity. It is for this reason that Art, privilege as it may be, must extend to one and all.
Anything that adds more beauty into the world should be available bountifully.
Junoon is the passion to give Art the reach it was always meant to have, To make it accessible to those it has thus far been unable to touch, To take it to those who feel they are far from it, To provide it to those who need it but don’t as yet know that they do and what it could potentially do for them, To take it where it can make it better, And to thereby erase boundaries of discrimination, judgment, condition and class.
THE DEAL
“You don’t have a right to the cards you believe you should have been dealt. You have an obligation to play the hell out of the ones you’re holding.”
Cheryl Strayed
Our Outreach Program is an effort to place a card coloured with JUNOON into every hand.
RELEASE
We are all distressed for different reasons. To the fortunate few the feeling is transient. For many others, it lingers and lowers morale, mood and deeply depresses.
Occurrences, circumstances and relationships are very personal and unique dynamics that impact us all differently.
The scars do not always heal very easily or naturally. And suppressed emotions have to find more creative outlets...
RURAL
Rural India is inhabited by the most cultural, athletic and artistic communities.
Classical Dance, which engages all three attributes, which incidentally took birth and once flourished in these innards, is no longeras present and pursued as it should be.
Our roots lie in our rural expanses. Classical Dance is the root of all the dance we will ever know.
JUNOON takes that passage back to where we began to take dance back to where it began...
A DIFFERENCE TO THE DIFFERENT
Our physicaland mental faculties are given to us arbitrarily. Their functionality is a stroke of luck, an accident of birth.
We all struggle with deformities and distractions of all kinds.
The capacity to intellectually and physically absorb technical instruction is crucial to the development of a human being. To a dancer, it is decisive...
SPRING CHICKENS
The elderly have an easy route to youth – Dancing. Spring, after all, does find its way back year after year.
It doesn’t matter how grey you’ve gone or if there’s any hair at all to go grey, so long as you have happy feet and bouncy eyes and shaky shoulders willing to shake some shackles off (or one of these at the very least), you’ll see there’s a lot of dance waiting to detonate from your insides.
On your home stretch, you want to remember what made getting there worth it;
ADVANTAGE, DANCER
Poverty deprives children of a lot of their childhood, if not all of it. It is too much joy lost too soon.
Dance is the first, most natural, most human expression of joy. Both cause and consequence must be a reality for all children.
Socio-economic disadvantage rarely allows its victims to have interests other than those that promptly pay.
Children are shunted into duties that are laborious, possibly perilous and perverse.
THE MOVEMENT
Ultimately, JUNOON is a movement. With movement. For movement. To move those who haven’t, those who can, those who want and are willing to, those who didn’t know they could because nobody told them they could and should.
We want to empower with Art that is classical, technically sound and legendary.
If women, men, children and dancers (everything humans can be) dance irrespective of privilege, ability, abode, acceptance and kismet, perhaps we’ve allied our JUNOON with that of many others.
TRAINING
A training program, which would typically last 2/3 weeks, incorporates an assortment of modules.
These would of course be tailored to the capacity of every dancer.
The experience has to be relieving rather than wearing.
We advance a variety of training methods to lower the risk of injury and to ensure every dancer has a wholesome and diversified experience.
Since we strongly believe that no dance form must be learnt in isolation, the body is conditioned through multiple disciplines that keep it healthy, well and stronger than when it began to train.
These are:
AN INTRODUCTION TO CLASSICAL DANCE
The basics of specifically Bharata Natyam and Classical Ballet are delved into.
The dancers are trained in key stances, postures and simple movements of the limbs to familiarize them with an Indian and Western Classical Dance form, the very best of both worlds.
DYNAMIC FLOW YOGA (VINYASA) AND PILATES
Yoga is fundamental to movement and therefore, dance. The dancers are taught how to move from one asana into the next in a seamless flow that appears as a dance in itself.
Pilates works a dancer’s core. It supports the body as it undertakes movement.
These are both performed on a simple foam Yoga Mat.
BASIC STRETCHING, STRENGTHENING AND FLEXIBILITY DRILLS
For Ballet, dancers begin to work at the Barre (this could simply be a chair). Muscles are flexed, stretched and toned to prepare them to dance.
Another essential preparatory workout for Ballet dancers is Floor Barre. Here, the flexing, stretching and toning happens on the floor as dancers lie over a mat.
For both Ballet and Bharata Natyam, there are basic warm-up, stretching and loosening drills that dancers are made to perform before dancing.
The dancers are taught certain exercises that strengthen the core and specific parts of the body, on the mat as well as standing, in order for them to take on movement.
These involve certain body weight exercises as well.
AN INTRODUCTION TO CONTEMPORARY DANCE
For all the discipline and neat framework that Classical Dance offers, Contemporary Dance lets a dancer just flow.
Unbound by rules, we teach dancers to simply respond to the music, tumble, fall, rise, extend, pause, jump, shuffle and stir as they please albeitin a graceful, certain and safe manner.
LYRICAL DANCE
Dancers are trained to make movements to match and illustrate the lyrics of a song.
Emotions and moods are displayed through movement and there is a lot of emphasis on the movements themselves as the words of the song influence them.
The dancers discover how their bodies can better explain songs by moving about or simply by being still at times.
STORYTELLING THROUGH MOVEMENT
The art of facial expression and drama is a significant part of Classical Dance.
The dancers learn how to tell stories through mime and movement.
Stories have always been an intrinsic part of any culture.
Hence, dancers learn to bring mythology, folklore and contemporary concepts to life as they dance to tell these tales and truths.
MOVEMENT CREATION
Once dancers settle into their practice of dance, they are encouraged to explore choreography by themselves.
Every movement, so long as it is technically strong and secure, is valid and appreciated.
It opens them up to their own imaginations and abilities to innovate, create, discard, include, discover and retain.
MUSIC METHODOLOGY
All dancers need a basic foundation in music. Classical Dance especiallynecessitates an understanding of melody and rhythm.
We teach the dancers how to catch a beat and count and move to it.
Additionally, dancers are taught to intuitively respond to melody or perform prescribed movements to it. Music is after all, the biggest stimulus to dance.
ART ATTACK
Firmly convinced that the Arts do not exist in isolation, dancers are taught to explore other art forms so as to enhance their training and understanding of movement.
Dancers better grasp their own art form when they indulge in others and discover that all art is ultimately interconnected.
Movement could be captured in a photograph or a painting or a sculpture.
A poem or passage could be danced. A visual could inspire dancers to demonstrate it through choreography.
A dance routine could be an ode to any artistic marvel. Our dancers are encouraged to believe, explore and perform the same.
Dance is a means to reach out and reach in. Our Outreach Program seeks to do just that. With sheer JUNOON.
