Astad Deboo
| Astad Deboo | |
|---|---|
| Born |
13 July 1947 Navsari, Gujarat, India |
| Dances | contemporary dance |
Astad Deboo (आस्ताद देबू; born 1947) is an Indian contemporary dancer and choreographer, who employs his training in Indian classical dance forms of Kathak as well as Kathakali to create a dance form that is unique to him, and has become a pioneer of modern dance in India. Throughout his long and illustrious career, he has worked with various prominent performers such as Pina Bausch, Alison Becker Chase and Pink Floyd, and performed in many parts of the world
He has been awarded the Sangeet Natak Akademi Award in 1996 and Padma Shri in 2007, awarded by the Government of India.
Astad Deboo was born in Navsari, though he grew up in Kolkata till the age of six years. Thereafter the family which are Parsi shifted to Jamshedpur, where his father was employed with Tata Steel. His mother was a homemaker, and he has two sisters, Kamal and Gulshan.
At the age of six, he started learning the Kathak dance form, from the late Indra Kumar Mohanty and the late Prahlad Das. He studied at Loyola School, Jamshedpur, from where he passed out in 1964, after which he moved to Mumbai and joined a B. Com. degree course at Podar College, University of Mumbai. While pursuing his degree here, he happened to see the contemporary dance of the American Murray Louis Dance Company, this changed the course of his life irrevocably. Shortly afterwards, Uttara Asha Coorlawala who was studying dance in New York, visited Bombay, and later helped Astad get admitted to Martha Graham Center of Contemporary Dance. Deboo left Bombay in 1969, on board a cargo boat that set sail from Bombay port, and later hitchhiked his way through Europe to eventually reach New York in 1974.
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