Astad Deboo

Astad Deboo (13 July 194710 December 2020) was an Indian contemporary dancer and choreographer. He was considered a pioneer of modern dance in India. Through his career he collaborated with artists including Pina Bausch, Alison Becker Chase and Pink Floyd, and performed across the world.

He was awarded the Sangeet Natak Akademi Award in 1995 and Padma Shri in 2007, awarded by the Government of India.

Early life

Deboo was born on 13 July 1947 into a Parsi family in Navsari, in the Indian state of Gujarat.

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,

Over the next decade, he went on to attend the London School of Contemporary Dance where he learnt Martha Graham's modern dance technique and thereafter went on to learn José Limón's technique in New York. He also trained with Pina Bausch in the Wuppertal Dance Company, Germany and with Alison Becker Chase of the Pilobolus Dance Company, and travelled through Europe, Americas, Japan and Indonesia.

A turning point in his career came in 1986, when Pierre Cardin commissioned him to choreograph for Maya Plisetskaya, the prima ballerina of the Bolshoi Theater ballet company.

In January 2005, he along with a troupe of 12 young women with hearing impairment, from the Clarke School for the Deaf, Chennai, and part of the Deboos Astad Deboo Dance Foundation, performed at the 20th Annual Deaf Olympics, at Melbourne, Australia. He choreographed the 2004 Hindi film by painter M. F. Husain, Meenaxi: A Tale of Three Cities. In 2009, he performed his production, 'Breaking Boundaries' with fourteen street children from the NGO Salaam Baalak Trust. These children had trained with his troupe for six months. In 2019, he collaborated with Hema Rajagopalan, Sikkil Gurucharan and George Brooks to perform "INAI" with the Natya Dance Theatre in Chicago.

Death He died in Mumbai aged 73 on 10th Dec 2020, a month after being diagnosed with non-Hodgkins lymphoma.

Awards

1995: Sangeet Natak Akademi Award 2007: Padma Shri