Teaching Career
Chitresh Das was brought to the United States in 1970 on a Whitney Fellowship to teach Kathak at the University of Maryland. In 1971, Pandit Das was invited by Ustad Ali Akbar Khan to the San Francisco Bay Area to teach Kathak and establish a dance program at the Ali Akbar College of Music (AACM) in San Rafael, California.
By 1979, he left the AACM faculty to form his own dance school called Chhandam; his “Chitresh Das Dance Company” (CDDC) was incorporated in 1980. In 1988, Das formed the first university accredited Kathak course in the U.S. at San Francisco State University; several current dancers of CDDC began studying with Das in the SFSU program. Das was also a guest faculty member at Stanford University.
His own school of Chhandam has continued to grow with branches in San Francisco, Fremont/Union City, Berkeley, Mountain View, San Jose, Sacramento, and Los Angeles. His disciples, Joanna De Souza and Gretchen Hayden went on to establish branches of Chhandam in Toronto (1990) and Boston (1992), respectively. Today, Chhandam currently has 550 students enrolled at branches across North America.
Through the years Das would return annually for several months to India in order to teach and perform. In 2002, Pandit Das reopened his parents’ school of Chhandam Nritya Bharati in Calcutta, India. In 2010, Pandit Das inaugurated the second branch of his school in India, Chhandam Nritya Bharati, in Mumbai. While in India, Pandit Das continues his work with the New Light Foundation teaching Kathak dance to the children of sex workers of the Kalighat red light district in Calcutta, as a part of a program to help them break free of the cycle of exploitation.
As he was trained by his Guru, Pandit Ram Narayan Misra, Das trains his own students, both in the US and India, within the guru-shisya parampara (the tradition of master and disciple). A Guru is “one who removes the darkness” through direct knowledge and training. Das remains committed to preserving the traditional one-to-one transmission of knowledge between guru and shisya in today’s society; he has trained many disciples who have gone on to become solo artists in their own right.
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