A Sinuous Bridge Over a Cultural Divide

Masako Ono, born in Japan, fell in love with Indian culture and will perform four Odissi dances tonight at the Japanese Information and Culture Center in Washington. (Photos By Manas Das)

Masako Ono's love for Indian culture began with a picture of the Taj Mahal she found in her social studies textbook as a little girl in Tokyo. But it wasn't until Ono traveled to India during college that she found her true calling: Indian dance.

Ono, 34, has been dancing since she was 5 -- ballet and hip-hop, mostly -- so when she was in India, she soaked up as many classical Indian dance performances as she could find. When one of her classmates showed her a video of a woman performing Odissi, a dance that originated in the 2nd Century B.C. as a form of Hindu worship but was lost for centuries, Ono knew she had found her art.

"It was so graceful and so new to me," she says. "It was really a discovery for me. I said, 'This is what I will do with my life.' "

Ono will perform four dances tonight in a free performance at the Japanese Information and Culture Center in Washington. (Seats are no longer available.)

After watching the video, she marched to the Embassy of India in Tokyo to find out where she could learn Odissi. They handed her a brochure for Nrityagram, a dance village in southern India. When she arrived there, the founder of the school, the late Indian model Protima Bedi, greeted her at the door. Bedi had a shaved head, cobra-shaped earrings and tattooed eyebrows. The teacher's appearance shocked Ono, but her attitude was even more startling.

"She said, 'What do you want? Are you going to be a professional Odissi dancer?' " Ono recalls. "I said I would try. [Bedi] said, 'Are you going to try or are you going to become one?' I said, 'Okay, I will become a professional Odissi dancer.' "

During her five years' training at Nrityagram, her days started with 10 minutes of eyeball strengthening exercises (hand gestures and eye work are common to all of India's classical dances), followed by an hour and a half of yoga practice. She danced Odissi for about five hours every day, and had to keep up with her share of chores.

At a rehearsal at the JICC earlier this week, Ono warmed up onstage by doing yoga poses. She wore pigtails, a floral tee and olive-green capris with the waist all bunched up and safety-pinned so that they would stay on her slim body. Tonight she will wear a costume made from a sari, bells on her ankles and red paint on her hands and feet for "aesthetic interest," she says.

Ono's program starts with her enacting a flower blossoming: She slinks on the stage, then pours an imaginary bowl of water over her head. She then moves into her favorite piece, "Saveri Pallavi," which has a quicker rhythm with intricate footwork, performed to the music of a sitar and male vocals.

"One of the important things [about Odissi] is that the foot slaps are very firm, but the torso movements are very fluid, like the water that washes the shores of Orissa," says Ratna Roy, a professor of dance at Evergreen State College in Olympia, Wash., and a scholar of Odissi. Roy notes that Odissi died out during the British rule of India and was revived only in the 1950s by piecing together the moves from artwork in Hindu temples and ancient texts.

Securing sponsorship has been difficult because of her nationality, Ono says. She's a tough sell to Indian organizations because she's not Indian, and some Japanese organizations have turned her down because she's not advancing Japanese culture.

Still, she has performed in India, Malaysia, Canada, the United States and Japan. Her corporate clients include ExxonMobil and Suzuki. Next February, Ono hopes to travel from New York to Florida on an East Coast tour and perform again in Washington.