Mumbai ballet school trains 250 students across 12 centres

Dhvani Kothari says more than 250 students attend her National Ballet School of India across 12 Mumbai centres. They include children as young as three and a 44-year-old mother of two.

Kothari founded the school in 2019 and wants ballet to be treated as a serious, accessible form of training rather than a narrowly defined hobby. “Ballet is for every body type, because there is really no limitation to how you do it,” she says.

A late start, then formal training

Kothari was 13 when a visiting Russian ballet instructor introduced her to the form. She had tried jazz, contemporary and hip hop before that, but says ballet clicked immediately.

Her route was less conventional than that of many dancers she trained with abroad. At 16, she spent six months in Croatia, returned at 19, and also trained in Hungary for almost six months. In classes where many students were 10 to 12, she was initially the oldest.

At 19, she won the Bosphorus Ballet Festival in Turkey, which she says drew participants from 75 countries. The win convinced her that Indian dancers could pursue ballet through formal, structured training.

A seven-to-eight-year syllabus

The school follows the Vaganova method of Russian ballet, with a structured syllabus spanning seven to eight years. Kothari has developed its curriculum, examinations, competitions and performances while also building a team and handling the school’s administration.

Its growth was interrupted soon after it began: Kothari says the school had crossed 100 students within a year when the pandemic moved classes online. She says that was a difficult adjustment for an art form dependent on physical correction and movement.

She also addresses assumptions around the form. Pointe work does not begin as soon as someone joins a class; it comes later, depending on a dancer’s training, ankle strength and core strength.

Space, floors and more boys

Mumbai has performance spaces including the Royal Opera House and NMACC, but Kothari says venues suited to full-scale ballet productions remain limited. Studios, too, often lack sprung flooring; she recalls dancers practising on marble floors when she began training in India.

The school currently has six boys, Kothari says. She says the shortage is apparent in performances with classical male roles, and hopes more boys take up ballet as the school continues training dancers who want to build careers in India.