The Chicago Tribune’s Lauren Warnecke talks with Hema Rajagopalan and her daughter Krithika, co-artistic directors of Natya Dance Theatre about the company’s history and impact as it prepares for “Sharira/Shariri: Held Within” at the Dance Center in March 2026.
Hema Rajagopalan says the last 50 years have flown by.
“It seems like a short time to me,” says Rajagopalan, the founder, artistic director and chief choreographer of Natya Dance Theatre.
The Indian dance company celebrates its 50th anniversary with three performances at the Dance Center of Columbia College Chicago.
“I can’t believe it’s already 50 years. It seems like yesterday that I struggled and I came here,” she says.
Rajagopalan moved to the United States from New Delhi, India, in 1974. She had been studying the South Indian dance form called Bharatanatyam since age six and came to the U.S. intending to give it up…
…Rajagopalan and her husband agreed to visit the U.S. for two years and never moved back; their daughter, Krithika, joined the family, which settled in the western suburbs.
For a short time, Hema Rajagopalan worked as a dietitian but quickly realized it wasn’t for her . She resumed dancing, privately at first, in a one-room studio in her home. She got an invitation to perform, then another to teach — and that’s how Natya Dance Theatre began.
“Culturally, it was sparse,” Hema says of the Indian diaspora at the time. “There was a dearth of understanding of our own culture.”
Fast-forward 50 years, and Chicagoland is now home to more than 250,000 Indian Americans, among the largest concentrations of Indian immigrants in the country. Students still flock to study with Hema, whose primary studio is in the basement of her Oak Brook home. Krithika, who currently lives in California, has developed her own following, despite (like her mother) not initially intending to make dance her profession. In addition to teaching and preparing dancers for professional study, marked by a solo debut performance called an arangetram, the two women together run a company dedicated to performing concert dance works — a format Hema pioneered for Bharatanatyam in Chicago…
…Hema listened to jazz music and attended dance concerts, forging intentional connections with Chicago’s modern dance scene — including a decades-long kinship with the Dance Center’s founder, Shirley Mordine. What resulted was not a fusion form — Natya Dance Theatre quite clearly stays in the Bharatanatyam lane.
“It’s not fusion, it’s influence,” Hema says, developing a brand of the artform uniquely informed by Chicago.
