DAWN - Features; July 19, 2007

Published July 19, 2007

Medha Yodh, an icon of classical dance, is dead

By Lewis Segal


LOS ANGELES: Medha Yodh, a distinguished classical Indian dancer and arts advocate who taught for many years at University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA), has died. She was 79 and had been in failing health for some time, said her daughter Kamal Muilenburg.

Yodh died on July 11 at Muilenburg’s home in San Diego. A memorial service in Los Angeles is being planned for the end of September.

“She was a very progressive person and a valuable member of the community,” said Ramaa Bharadvaj, a prominent Southland dancer, choreographer, teacher and leader of her own dance company. “I always thought she was way ahead of her time in what Indian dance should represent. She was also a very frank and open critic, and whenever I did something new, I always wanted to get her opinion.”

Yodh was born on July 31, 1927, in Ahmadabad in the Indian state of Gujarat and began dancing before the age of five. She soon became particularly fascinated by bharata natyam, one of the best-known classical dance forms of India. She later called it “a magnificent tool to centre human beings, to give them an inner sense of being and to teach them focus, poise, discipline and the integration of different arts. I think it develops character”.

Her education, however, put a priority on science. She received a bachelor of science degree from the University of Bombay and a master’s in chemistry from Stanford University. And it was her knowledge of chemistry that brought her to the US.

“I have a proper Brahman background,” she told the newspaper in 1984. “I grew up in British India, and I was expected to learn the arts, to go into the sciences and to travel abroad.”

Her travels changed her life in many ways. She met, married and later divorced a Swedish medical student, Carl von Essen. She discovered modern dance as well as other world dance idioms that she began to study. And in Connecticut, not India, she met Tanjore Balasaraswati, the most revered Indian dancer of her time, who became Yodh’s lifelong role model.

“When she arrived here in 1962,” Yodh recalled two decades later, “four of us went and sat at her feet and said, ‘Teach us’”.

Yodh joined the UCLA faculty in 1976, teaching Balasaraswati’s style and artistic values. Locally based choreographer and company director Malathi Iyengar studied with her in the early ’90s as part of a master of fine arts curriculum and remembers her “giving me wonderful feedback. She kept emphasising spirituality and devotion and tried to open my mind”.

Iyengar also saw Yodh dance during this period and describes her approach as “pure and emotional — she was a very loyal student of Balasaraswati. She didn’t like a lot of glamour; she was more involved with interpretation”.

In 1987, Yodh created a documentary film, “Garba-Ras: A Glimpse into Gujarati Culture,” much respected in academic circles.

She retired from UCLA in 1994, then served as an adviser to various arts organisations — including the Dance Kaleidoscope showcase series — and continued to dance at a number of local venues.

As late as 2000, she performed in the “Spirit Dances” series at Highways Performance Space in Santa Monica, “looking seriously possessed,” in the words of a Times reviewer, “with hearty foot slapping and filigreed fingers”. She also did private teaching in Oakland until 2002, when she moved to San Diego.

She is survived by Muilenburg; another daughter, Neila von Essen of Alameda, Calif.; and two granddaughters. Her son, Eric von Essen, a noted jazz bassist, died in 1997. —Dawn/The Los Angeles Times News Service



© DAWN Group of Newspapers, 2007

Opinion

Editorial

Exceptional Assembly
Updated 01 Mar, 2025

Exceptional Assembly

Both the govt and the NA remained completely unbothered by public perceptions in their first year.
Haqqania bombing
Updated 01 Mar, 2025

Haqqania bombing

If the seminary attack is indeed traced to IS, it would signal a fresh security challenge in KP.
Blood and drugs
01 Mar, 2025

Blood and drugs

FREQUENT news stories about bone-chilling murders show that the face of crime is changing — there is a marked rise...
No remorse
Updated 28 Feb, 2025

No remorse

Disturbingly, the regime seems to grow bolder in its defiance of its obligations with each passing day.
Affordable Ramazan
28 Feb, 2025

Affordable Ramazan

WITH the month of Ramazan commencing in a day or two, a price spiral peculiar to the fasting month has kicked off....
Grotesque vision
28 Feb, 2025

Grotesque vision

THE Trump administration has sunk to a new low in its cavalier approach to the Gaza crisis. It seems all sense has...