Dakshina, The Daniel Phoenix Singh Dance Company, brought its dramatic signature work “Vasanth” and three mood pieces to the new (10/10/2010) Artisphere. “Vasanth” tells of the death and rebirth of Love and of Spring’s return to this world. It has runs for the corps that swirl swiftly about the stage, pantomimic action with a poignant appeal, sensuality plus a feast of joyous foot patter. A mixed cast of familiar and new performers (including Graham Pitts as Love, Shailaja Maru as Spring, Singh as the entranced/awakened great god Shiva, Madhvi Venkatesh as Desire, and Stacey Yvonne Claytor as Shiva’s consort) gave a very fresh performance of Singh’s melding of Indiadance, modern dance and ballet.

The three other works went well together. One was a thoughtful love dance for two men, “Since You’ve Asked” by Singh. He and Jamal Ari Black gave it nobility. In “By the Light…”, the late Eric Hampton visualized Beethoven’s “Moonlight Sonata” as a woman’s solo of sorrow. She looks up into the light of the moon, she leans back in the moonbeams as if to remember, she grieves and, briefly, succeeds in conjuring up her lost love. This is a solo more than it is a duo, one of intensity and utter simplicity. Natalia Pinzon honed it to perfection. As her ghostly partner, Black was present for an instant and then not. The last formal piece on the program, Ludovic Jolivet’s “Voy y Vengo”, is for 6 dancers (only 5 were listed in the program) seated on roller chairs. Jolivet transformed the people and chairs into a congregation. Its members bowed and straightened, they held up their arms and folded them, they took hold of others’ hands and let go while unobtrusively pedaling their chairs over and around the stage space. They moved on smooth paths and in simple formations to music by Franz Schubert, Yann Tiersen and Jolivet himself. This roller dance could have been shorter but by no means was it a gimmick. Concluding the program was a dance party in Artisphere’s ballroom . (December 11, 2011 in the Black Box Theater of Arlington, Virginia’s Artisphere.)

Artisphere (Rosslyn Metro)
1101 Wilson Boulevard
Arlington, VA 22209
Buy Tickets

Artisphere presents award-winning fusion Indian dance works by the acclaimed Dakshina/Daniel Phoenix Singh Dance Company (Dakshina) followed by Bhangra dance parties with the U.S. Department of Bhangra’s DJ Beta-G on December 9 and 10 at 8pm with a special Sunday matinee at 3pm for families. Tickets to the 8pm dance performance followed by the Bhangra dance party are $25, or come at 9pm Friday and Saturday exclusively for Bhangra dancing for $15. Tickets to the Sunday 3pm matinee for families (which includes both the dance performance and Bhangra dance party) are $12 for adults and $8 for children. There will be a free open dress rehearsal of the Dakshina dance performance on Thursday, December 8 at 7:30pm.

The Dakshina/Daniel Phoenix Singh Dance Company offers artists and communities the unique opportunity to experience dance as a movement that links the arts, cultures and social causes. Examining the connections between Indian, social, and modern dance forms, Dakshina has repeatedly brought dance out of the auditorium, pushing the boundaries of form through the use of film, interviews, popular music and theater. The Company is committed to making dance a central part of the performing arts and often facilitates international cultural dialogues with visiting dancers and choreographers from around the world. Dakshina’s fusion works were recently showcased in India and Bangladesh to critical acclaim in both countries. These unique and cultural dance works use a syncretic blend of Bharata Natyam and modern dance forms to explore contemporary versions of Indian myths. This tour of Dakshina is made possible by a grant from Mid Atlantic Arts Foundation with support from the National Endowment for the Arts.

For the Artisphere engagement, the Company warms up with Singh’s signature fusion work “Vasanth”, which depicts the Indian myth of how spring comes to earth–the work premiered to critical acclaim at Kennedy Center’s Maximum India Festival. “Since You’ve Asked” is a tender duet for two men drawing on Singh’s gestural, lyrical work. Other highlights include Eric Hampton’s “By the Light…”, a gem of a dance depicting Hampton’s struggle with Lou Gehrig’s disease. Interestingly, Hampton chose the Moonlight Sonata for the score, which historians now agree was written during Beethoven’s middle period when he had already begun losing his hearing. Whether by choice or by luck, the poignancy of a choreographer losing his ability to move and a musician losing his ability to hear are brought together in this gem of a dance. The evening will close with Ludovic Jolivet’s whimsical and poignant work “Voy Y Vengo.” Jolivet is an Arlington based artist who creates works that connect modern dance and mime. In “Voy Y Vengo”, the dancers use office chairs as their props to explore the cycles of life.

Join in the dancing after each performance with the U.S. Department of Bhangra’s DJ Beta-G as he spins the greatest in Bhangra dance music. DJ Beta-G throws parties in and around DC for those wanting to dance the night away to the pungent rhythms of Punjabi dance music, a type of Bhangra music.

Tickets to attend the dance performance and Bhangra dance party on Friday and Saturday at 8pm are $25 and $12 adults + $8 kids for the Sunday 3pm matinee. Tickets to attend just the Bhangra dance party on Friday and Saturday at 9pm are $15. The open dress rehearsal for the Dakshina dance performance on Thursday, December 8 at 7:30pm is free.

For more information visit www.artisphere.com.

What drew you to Dakshina?

Donald with visiting artist Alarmel Valli

And what keeps you coming back?

Three things: Daniel’s insistence that his work include social awareness; the concept that dance does not (and cannot) exist apart from all of the other arts; and, the fact that the Company is like an extension of family for all of its members.

What is your most treasured story of a visiting artist you met?

This is absolutely NOT a fair question as I have treasured memories from each of our guest artists. While I understand that each of them is a world class artist, I interact with them, and view them, as a new friend that I am hosting in my city.

Runners-up: Being the lunch guest of VP & Shanta Dhananjayan with Daniel at the Yogaville ashram; being invited to share the afternoon meal with Mallika Sarabhai and her dancers last fall; being invited to share rehearsal with only Lorry May, Melissa Greco Liu and Daniel.

However, you said “story”, so here is the winner:
During the 2009 Fall Festival, I was fortunate to spend a great deal of time with Madhavi Mudgal and her niece Arushi. As the guests were arriving for Leela Samson’s Saturday night performance, I met Alif Laila, who is a great friend of the Company, also my personal friend and an extraordinary sitar artist. Knowing I was watching over our guest artists, she asked about meeting them. I assured her I would introduce her to Leela after the performance. I added that Madhavi was coming to the performance to see her friend Leela and I would make sure she met her for a few private words. Alif asked, “Madhavi? Do you mean Madhavi Mudgal? You know her? Donald, she is like a goddess to me!” So, at intermission, I walked Alif Laila to meet her goddess, Madhavi Mudgal. The joy in Alif’s face – that I will never forget.

What one thing would you tell prospective volunteers?

This is very easy. Friends always ask, hey what did you do yesterday, last week, this past weekend. After a few Dakshina events – sitar, spoken word, backstage at the Lincoln Theater, rehearsals, – your friends will say: “Wow. You have a very interesting life”.

Have you considered volunteering with Dakshina? You’ll get the satisfaction of making dance a central part of the art scene in DC, and you’ll get to meet world class artists through out the year. There are several ways in which you can get involved. Please consider

1. Joining our board
2. Volunteering with us for special projects
3. Interning with us–you can even earn course credit

Feel free to email us with questions at info@dakshina.org.

Sunday, October 2
3:30 p.m.
Westminster Presbyterian Church
400 I Street, SW, Washington DC

This event is FREE – RSVP to rsvp@dakshina.org.

Gowri Koneswaran is a poet, singer, and lawyer whose parents immigrated to the U.S. from Sri Lanka. She was a Lannan Fellow of the Folger Shakespeare Library and has been a featured poet at the Kennedy Center’s Millennium Stage and the Smithsonian Folklife Festival. Her poetry has appeared in Bourgeon and is forthcoming in Beltway Poetry Quarterly. She was a member of the 2010 DC Southern Fried Slam team and serves as the program director at BloomBars, a community arts space in Columbia Heights, where she hosts Poetry in the Morning and co-hosts The Garden open mic. Gowri is also the founder of The AlternaGirls. Information on her upcoming performances can be found at her blog, Not Here Long.

Learn about other Fall Festival of Indian Arts events.

Join us for our 8th Annual Fall Festival of Indian Arts and our 7th year of partnership with Alif. We are excited to have her back with us this Fall. Gracious and talented, she serves as a role model and mentor to Daniel.

Alif Laila was born and raised in Dhaka, Bangladesh. Her connection with the arts has been very deep since early childhood. In Dhaka, Bangladesh, she began her initial training in vocal music, and was eventually inspired to learn the Sitar by her mother, Shehida. She was trained on a ‘one to one’ basis in the techniques and compositions of classical music by Ustad Mir Qasem Khan, nephew of Ustad Allauddin Khan, and founder of the Senia Maihar school of music. Alif’s passion for the arts was beyond music alone. She attended the College of Fine Arts in Dhaka where she graduated with a Bachelor’s degree and received several awards for her water color paintings. The world of rhythm and tone in drawing and painting gradually merged with her music and her love story with the arts began. She was fortunate to receive guidance from teachers like Partha Chatterjee and Krishna Bhatt and blessings from Ustad Ali Akbar Khan. She has performed extensively in many prestigious venues in Bangladesh, India, Europe and the USA. World renowned Tabla artists like Pandit Anindo Chatterjee, Ustad Taari Khan, and Pandit Yogesh Shamsi have performed and recorded with her. In 2007 her DVD ‘Hrydayaragam’ was presented at The Smithsonian. She has recently released another DVD, ‘Strings of Resonance’ with Anubrata Chatterjee, presenting Indian Classical music as the link to the heritage of the land from the past to the present.

With devotion and dedication Alif embraces the Sitar as the instrument of her soul.

To know more about her and watch her video-clips please visit her website: www.aliflailasitar.com and blog: aliflailasitar.blogspot.com.

Participants will learn one item and then Ms Samson will explore the dynamics of group choreography by adapting the dance item taught into group choreography. For advanced Bharata Natyam dancers–post Arengetram level highly recommended.

Dates of workshop will be between Monday October 3rd through Wednesday October 5th. Final times will be published by the end of August. Participants will learn a historic dance “Nee Uraippai Hanumane” originally choreographed by Rukmini Devi Arundale. Leela akka learnt this dance directly from Rukmini devi and this will be a rare opportunity to learn one of the Kalakshetra items first hand from Leela akka. We encourage workshop participants to stay for Leela akka’s Solo performance on October 7th and the Kalakshetra group performance on October 8th.

Venue: Workshop will take place from 9 am to 12 pm in the mornings on October 3, 4 and 5th, in Silver Spring, at the Maryland Youth Ballet–easily accessible on the subway or metro buses.

Cost of workshop is $450. Only online payments will be accepted.

Leela Samson is among India’s most dynamic and technically brilliant dancers, an outstanding representative of Kalakshetra, the famed institute for the classical arts founded by the late Rukmini Devi Arundale on the Chennai ocean front. She joined Kalakshetra as a young child and her formative years were spent in imbibing the nuances of Bharata Natyam and related arts at the feet of celebrated gurus.

Her personal style is unostentatious, serene and characterized by an impeccable technique that blends geometrical precision with vibrancy and an unfettered ease. Her rhythmic acumen is apparent in dance compositions containing varied and challenging percussion patterns. Among the many honours conferred on her, Leela Samson was awarded the prestigious Padmashri by the President of India in recognition of her outstanding contribution to the art of Bharata Natyam as well as the Sangeet Natak Akademi Award instituted by the apex cultural body of the Government of India. Currently, she is the Director of Kalakshetra, Chennai, the oldest dance/theater institution in India.

With support from the ICCR, Mid-Atlantic Arts Foundation, DC Commission on the Arts and Humanities and in cooperation with the Indian Embassy.
Friday October 7 at 7:30 pm
Lincoln Theatre
1215 U Street NW

PLENTY OF TICKETS AVAILABLE AT THE THEATRE. Box office will open at 6:00 pm.

Join us for our 8th Annual Fall Festival of Indian Arts. Leela Samson opens the festival on Friday October 7 at 7:30 pm with a Bharata Natyam performance. Samson is among India’s most dynamic and technically brilliant dancers, an outstanding representative of Kalakshetra, the famed institute for the classical arts founded by the late Rukmini Devi Arundale on the Chennai ocean front. She joined Kalakshetra as a young child and her formative years were spent in imbibing the nuances of Bharata Natyam and related arts at the feet of celebrated gurus.

Her personal style is unostentatious, serene and characterized by an impeccable technique that blends geometrical precision with vibrancy and an unfettered ease. Her rhythmic acumen is apparent in dance compositions containing varied and challenging percussion patterns. Among the many honors conferred on her, Leela Samson was awarded the prestigious Padmashri by the President of India in recognition of her outstanding contribution to the art of Bharata Natyam as well as the Sangeet Natak Akademi Award instituted by the apex cultural body of the Government of India. Currently, she is the Director of Kalakshetra, Chennai, the oldest dance/theater institution in India.

PLENTY OF TICKETS AVAILABLE AT THE THEATRE. Box office will open at 6:00 pm.

With support from the ICCR, Mid-Atlantic Arts Foundation, DC Commission on the Arts and Humanities and in cooperation with the Indian Embassy.
Saturday October 8 at 7:30 pm
Lincoln Theatre
1215 U Street NW

PLENTY OF TICKETS AVAILABLE AT THE THEATRE. Box office will open at 6:00 pm.

Join us for our 8th Annual Fall Festival of Indian Arts. Leela Samson closes the festival on Saturday October 8 at 7:30 pm with Spanda, her critically reviewed Bharata Natyam performance. Samson is among India’s most dynamic and technically brilliant dancers, an outstanding representative of Kalakshetra, the famed institute for the classical arts founded by the late Rukmini Devi Arundale on the Chennai ocean front. She joined Kalakshetra as a young child and her formative years were spent in imbibing the nuances of Bharata Natyam and related arts at the feet of celebrated gurus.

Watch a video clip of SPANDA.

SPANDA

‘Spanda’, (a vibration) is symbolic of the enduring and perpetual energy that is the life force of the universe. It incorporates the philosophical concept of Prithvi as the center and source of energy in the universe and equates it with the nabham, the womb as the origin of energy in the human body.

The rediscovery of the basic movements of Bharata Natyam and the need for a reinterpretation of its traditional vocabulary challenges Spanda. Spanda seeks to establish a more relevant dialogue between dance, music and stagecraft.

PLENTY OF TICKETS AVAILABLE AT THE THEATRE. Box office will open at 6:00 pm.

‘Spanda-Matrika’ reduces movement to its essence. It is a journey inwards seeking the essential ‘center’, the origin of movement and its source of strength through the adavus (dance steps) of the Bharata Natyam style. On one level, it attempts to internalize the consciousness of the dancer towards the particular movement rather than on the composition of the whole. On the other, no dancer is whole in the composition
without every other. Much like life, the dancer is made conscious of the energy she brings to the group and how that enhances the whole. Spanda Matrika is based on the various rhythm cycles in Carnatic music.

Aakash

‘Who would breathe, who would live,
If there were not this bliss in space’

Aakash attempts an exploration of the concept of space. Using slokas (verses) from the Vedas, the dancer discovers it, explores it, celebrates it – through movement. Aakash is the universe. Its garbha is Prithvi, the earth. All life emanates from this center, explores outwards, interacting constantly with space – which surrounds it, nurtures it, gives it form and being. The life-force of the dancer is the nabha – from
this center, all movement emanates.

Charishnu is indicative of the intent or desire to move. It is an expression of the joy of ‘journeying’. Every individual, animal, or nation – journeys in a manner typical of his own nature. We move in different ways, in different directions, at a differing pace. What is exciting is the dynamics of this movement happening differently, at the same time. It is the physics of the constellations. It is the happening of creation. Making use of the the different rhythm cycles in Carnatic music, the abstract movement in Charishnu simply enjoys what it is doing.

The choreography for ‘Spanda’ is by Ms. Leela Samson.

Read the review by Pamela Squires on our performance featuring Anna Sokolow’s iconic pieces at the Clarice Smith Performing Arts Center.

Dance View Times Review (11-7-10)

Read the review by George Jackson, a much respected veteran dance critic who writes in several local, national, and international mediums.

Washington Post Feature by chief critic Sarah Kaufman (10-31-10)

Sarah Kaufman, the Post’s Pulitzer prize winning chief dance critic features Dakshina’s exponential growth in the last few years and talks about the upcoming performances at the Clarice Smith Performing Arts Center. Read full article here.

Metro Weekly Features Dakshina (11-4-10)

Metro Weekly, one of DC’s leading LGBT community papers features Dakshina. Read full article here.

Another Dakshina First: WMUC interviews Daniel Phoenix Singh on their Radio Program (11-2-10)

This is the first time the student run radio station at the University of Maryland has ever interviewed a guest artist for their show. Listen to the full interview here.

Dance View Times review of our Fall Festival (10-08-10)

Veteran dance critic George Jackson reviews our featured artist Mallika Sarabhai’s performance at the Lincoln Theatre. Read full article here.

By Sarah Kaufman
Washington Post Staff Writer
Sunday, October 31, 2010

It is a deceptively simple picture: Daniel Phoenix Singh sits in a wooden chair, hands on his lap, staring straight ahead. He’s one of nine dancers in this studio at Silver Spring’s Maryland Youth Ballet, all of them seated the same rigid way, as if they have been plotted on graph paper and are captive to an unyielding calculus.

Slowly, on the same silent count, Singh and the others lean forward, making a focused appeal to the wall they’re facing.

The dancers are members of Singh’s company, Dakshina. Karen Bernstein, one of two rehearsal directors watching their run-through of the opening moments of Anna Sokolow’s “Rooms,” stops them. In this 1955 work that distills the alienation of apartment-dwellers, that forward pitch in their posture is a pleading gesture to the audience, Bernstein tells them, “like, ‘Help me — I have something important to say.’ ” The dancers scooch back against their chairs and repeat their mute entreaty, making it a little gentler around the eyes, a little more poignant.

Simple enough. Though for Singh, 38, getting to this point has been anything but easy. To this soft-spoken man whose Indian birth certificate is stamped “backward class” as a signifier of his low caste, to this onetime misfit who would be trapped in techie geekdom if he hadn’t discovered dance at the University of Maryland — to Singh, this studio, these chairs, the specificity of Sokolow’s work: This is what freedom looks like.

After a few years of dancing works by Sokolow, a pioneer in American modern dance who died in 2000, Dakshina/Daniel Phoenix Singh will perform two all-Sokolow programs — including “Rooms,” her most famous piece, with each chair representing an isolated flat; “Dreams,” a searing meditation on the Holocaust; and reconstructions of her little-known “Frida,” based on the life of painter Frida Kahlo, and the love duet “September Sonnet.” Performances are Thursday and Friday at the University of Maryland’s Clarice Smith Performing Arts Center.

These shows won’t be the end of Singh’s Sokolow obsession. With the help of Lorry May, one of Sokolow’s leading dancers, who now licenses her choreography (mostly to colleges and small regional groups), Singh hopes to acquire Sokolow’s existing catalogue, some 30 works.

As it is, Singh’s two rehearsal directors, Bernstein and Harriet Moncure Williams, are compiling written notations of the Sokolow works that May has taught the company — a remarkable act of preservation.

Why is Singh taking this on? How did this Indian immigrant become enmeshed in the biting social commentary of a leftist Jewish woman? As a founding member of the Actors Studio, Sokolow taught movement to such stage and screen stars as Julie Harris and Eli Wallach. But in the centennial of her birth, her dances can be seen only spottily. (As an example of how prominent Sokolow once was in the New York arts scene, she was the original choreographer for the 1967 off-Broadway run of “Hair” — the showcase that launched the anthemic musical into enduring popularity, as witnessed by its current sojourn at the Kennedy Center. But that kind of success was not to be Sokolow’s. She was fired just before the show opened.)

Singh first saw one of Sokolow’s pieces at Dance Place 12 years ago — it was her 1945 solo “Kaddish,” performed by Risa Steinberg, a veteran interpreter of Sokolow’s work. At just five minutes long, it is a sustained gasp of mourning, in which the dancer wraps herself in her arms, beats her chest and plunges to the floor, then drifts away into the shadows. Brief as it was, it spoke to Singh.

“It’s all about the hands,” he says, spooning stewed lentils over a mound of rice at Heritage India near Dupont Circle. He demonstrates a few gestures from the solo, reaching across the table with long fingers, then cradling his face in his palms. “It was kind of a cultural trigger for me. I don’t know what it was about it, but I felt this powerful longing and pain in her.”

And there was something else. “I have seen my mother beat her chest in mourning,” he says. “It’s an Indian thing, a really physical slap. It’s an image you don’t forget easily; it still makes me lose my breath when I think about it. To see it from a different cultural perspective — it triggered something.”

But there is more than sentimentality behind the story of Singh’s connection with the volatile expressionism of this pre- “Mad Men”-era artist. There is something pure about it. This is the story of art bridging cultural divides, time and mortality. And–at the risk of sounding like another type of chest-beater–it could only happen here.

* * *

Anna Sokolow grew up on New York’s Lower East Side, the daughter of Russian immigrants. She danced with Martha Graham in the 1930s before making her own works that expressed human pain and fortitude in powerful new ways — often with screams, explosive agitation and frozen moments of watchfulness. She drew inspiration from city life, its energy as well as its confinement; she channeled the agonies of the Holocaust and the arts of Mexico, where she frequently worked. Companies as diverse as the Joffrey Ballet, Alvin Ailey American Dance Theater and Israel’s Batsheva Dance Company have performed her work.

Yet even before her death at 90, Sokolow had been steadily fading from public view. An influential teacher who inspired such choreographers as Jerome Robbins and Martha Clarke, she had never founded a dance school or maintained a studio, and there was little funding to keep her on-again, off-again troupe, the Players’ Project, in business.

Meanwhile, on the other side of the planet, dance held a secret fascination for Singh, but it had to remain just that — a secret. The youngest of three children, he was raised in Mumbai and Chennai in a financially strapped, strict Methodist family near the bottom of India’s rigid social structure. Daniel, his brother, David, and sister, Tara, attended religious schools and were kept away from things considered non-Christian. That included classical Indian dance forms such as bharatanatyam, the sensual, highly theatrical form grounded in Hindu mythology, which Singh knew about only from Bollywood films.

His life had one thrust, drilled into him by his parents, who saw a high-tech career as the only way to a better life: “I have to succeed, I have to succeed, I have to succeed.” Recalling the mantra now, Singh grips his head in his hands.

After Singh’s sister married an Indian American and moved to Maryland, she brought her parents over, and they, in turn, brought over Singh and his brother in 1990. A few years later, as Singh was nearing graduation from the University of Maryland, Baltimore County, as a computer science major, he realized he lacked a physical education credit. He signed up for a ballet class. And discovered and lost his heart in almost the same moment.

The physicality was a rush. In India, he says with a shy smile, “I was nerdy.” (Nerdier than the other techie kids? He considers. Well, he says, “I wasn’t out there playing cricket.”) With his lean athletic build, Singh looks far from nerdy now. He’s fashionably urbane, wearing a crisp deep purple shirt and dark trousers, his black hair neatly parted and slicked straight. A few curls have sprung free, charmingly, around his ears.

Through dance, Singh says, “I found comfort in my body. I didn’t have to articulate in words.”

And he couldn’t get enough of it. He studied the modern-dance techniques of Graham, Merce Cunningham and Jose Limon. He was working as a janitor at Rockville High School when one night there was a bharatanatyam concert in the auditorium, by a Gaithersburg-based troupe called Nrityanjali. For the first time, Singh saw a live performance of one of the oldest dances of his homeland. Soon after, he persuaded Nrityanjali director Meena Telikacherla to take him on as a student.

“I had to really start from scratch,” Telikacherla says. “But his wanting to learn — that impressed me. And he had the discipline to come on a regular basis.”

Singh wanted to crack the code of this complicated dance form, whose clarity “was breathtaking to watch,” he says. But he could hardly have chosen a more difficult art to begin at the late age of 23. In bharatanatyam, the dancer must be deeply expressive — communicating a story and emotions with the body as well as the face — while moving to highly complex rhythms: The hands, fingers and even the eyes respond to specific musical counts as the feet pound out a beat of their own.

Singh’s family wasn’t pleased by this cultural connection, he says. As Christians, they were appalled that he was throwing himself into a form of dance with origins in Hindu temple rituals. Then came another shock: Having found a supportive community of artists here, and having rejected his fundamentalist upbringing, Singh came out as a gay man.

Since then, neither his brother, a Methodist minister, nor his sister has had much contact with him. His mother, Singh says, tried “to pray me straight.” She fasted. She lamented that it was all her fault, that if only his father, who had recently died, were still alive “this wouldn’t have happened.”

* * *

It was around this time that Singh saw Sokolow’s “Kaddish.”

The title refers to the Hebrew prayer of mourning. Sokolow had created it in 1945, with the Holocaust and her father’s death on her mind. When Singh saw it, after losing his father, to whom he’d never been able to reveal what was truest about himself — his homosexuality, his love of dance — the performance unleashed the grief he’d been keeping inside. In Sokolow’s work, he realized, the dancer is not merely form or motion, as she is in so much of contemporary dance. She is a person, a real person with feelings like his.

Discovering the living humanity in Sokolow’s work, created half a century before and a world away from Singh, was like finding the last piece of a puzzle. Now he knew what he wanted to do with his life: run a dance company that brought together modern dance — particularly Sokolow’s brand — and bharatanatyam.

“Dance helped me put all these pieces of myself — being Indian and being gay and being an immigrant — together,” Singh says. “It’s a place where you can be all of yourself and not divide yourself.”

Luckily, his nerdy side meant that Singh was better equipped to float this improbable dream than most. For the past 13 years he has worked for the Association of American Colleges and Universities, where he is director of information systems. He owns a house. He has job security.

“Yeah, if I don’t get outsourced — to India,” he cracks.

He founded Dakshina, which means “offering” in Sanskrit, in 2004, after getting a master’s in fine arts from the University of Maryland in College Park in dance, performance and choreography.

In some ways, he’s more stereotypically Indian now than he was when he was growing up in India. He has become a vegetarian, and he teaches yoga. His choreography for Dakshina fuses bharatanatyam with modern dance. And once a year he hosts an Indian dance festival at the Lincoln Theatre, bringing over prominent dancers from India. Among them is Mallika Sarabhai, a dancer so celebrated that when I had lunch with her and Singh at an Indian restaurant here some time ago, the wait staff asked to pose with her for photos.

“He’s genuinely trying to find a new language, and doing it with a mixed company and doing it in a way that I find really interesting and not just superficial,” says Sarabhai, who performed at this year’s festival on Oct. 8. “I think it comes out of very deep thought.” As for Singh’s interest in Sokolow, Sarabhai reasons that “the raw emotion is something that is very Indian. None of the Indian arts is stony-faced and abstract, in that sense.”

Working with a modest annual budget of less than $250,000, Singh has built Dakshina into a busy operation with a growing presence both here and internationally. He has taken Sokolow’s work to Bangladesh and India. He has performances booked around here through July, including at the Kennedy Center’s Maximum India festival in March. Next month, he takes his company to Argentina for the Queer Tango Festival in Buenos Aires.

He performs every year at Dance Place, where he had his Sokolow epiphany.

And he calls his mother every day, even though she doesn’t come to his performances.

His analytical background gives him a realistic view of his future; he is prepared to run Dakshina at a loss for several more years. “I have a lot of dance friends who quit their day jobs and moved to New York, and now they’re waiting tables,” he says. “So I’m holding on to my job.”

But Singh says he’ll never give up dancing. Like the characters in Sokolow’s “Rooms,” he has something important to say.

“It’s a big journey,” he says. “I feel like I’ve just started.”

Buy tickets at the Clarice Smith Performing Arts Center website.

An Evening of Anna Sokolow performed by Dakshina/Daniel Phoenix Singh Dance Company. Nov. 4 and 5 at 8 p.m. at Clarice Smith Performing Arts Center, University of Maryland. Tickets $30.