Research

Bala’s career has been atypical, falling into two phases, one as a world class performer with productions based on intense comprehensive research and another as a passionate teacher. As an artist, she specializes in performing as a soloist and has developed her own dance technique, and currently she works on number of projects on Performing Arts, raising the awareness of Bharatanatyam and its relationship to other performing arts, presenting them across the world. Bala works on the study of movement technique investigating the relationship of the movement technique from an interdisciplinary domain; Dance Technique, Cultural Perspectives of South Asia, Music, Literature, Art History and Dance Anthropology. Bala Devi Chandrashekar’s unique success is her ability to connect across diverse audiences seamlessly and the ability to deliver her message.

Bala’s focus on lecture, research and teaching blends seamlessly with her concert platform. Her lecturers incorporate the core architectural components of ancient temple sculptures – Karanas, governed by artistic laws of value bridging disciplines together and reducing the hazy scope. She has participated in numerous lectures, intercultural, religious and performing arts events as a faculty, consultant and mentor and is the recipient of several prestigious grants from several state and private foundations including the NJ Humanities council, Texas commission on the Arts and Ohio State Council on the Arts.

Bala is one of the few Bharatanatyam dancers worldwide to have produced eleven world-class, critically acclaimed productions. These productions are based on intensive, scholarly research. Bala’s work, “Nadanar Charithram,” is one of the bestselling Bharatanatyam productions worldwide and is extremely popular worldwide. The other productions are MLV Favorites, KrishnaArpanam, Udhhava Gita - Lord Krishna's Last Message, Vishwam - the Omnipresent, Tripura - Divine Feminine, Karna - Destiny's Child, Brihadeeswara - Form to Formless, Thru the Eyes of a Devaradiyal, Padmavati - an Avatar, Maa - The eternal Truth and FujiHima - Specially produced for the Indo - Japan relationship.