The reviews were equally re-assuring. The Independent of the UK, for instance wrote, “If the Théâtre du Châtelet was hoping for a spectacle on a scale seldom seen these days, this work...offered endless potential. Bollywood director Sanjay Leela Bhansali, making his first foray into opera, obliged with a flamboyant production attentive to authentic detail...the exotic dancing not only put them (singers) in the shade but concealed the scantiness of the plot, never mind the subtleties of Roussel’s remarkable score.”
Shankar is not new to experiments in her chosen medium. Trained under the New Dance technique introduced by her legendary father-in-law Uday Shankar, she started her own contemporary dance company in the Seventies. From compositions set to her husband Ananda Shankar’s scores to poems and songs of Tagore, she has traversed the whole gamut of Indian dance fusing it with eclectic innovations. In the three decades following her first professional choreography in 1978, there have been countless performances, each at illustrious venues like the Carnegie Hall in New York, Kennedy Center in Washington DC or the Queen Elizabeth Hall in London where she has seamlessly blended Indian aesthetics with Western sensibilities. There have been prestigious projects too—the 1998 cricket World Cup or the 1982 Asian Games or more recently, Uddharan which won the best production award from the West Bengal government in 2002. 

Her latest project too bears the same stamp of innovation. Tentatively titled We Are The Living , it is based on Sufi poet Rumi’s work Human Being, which has been set to music by Debojyoti Mishra. Shankar considers it her most ambitious project yet, having worked on it for almost a year. “Both poetry and dance are very fluid forms. It takes a lot of effort to synchronise the two. In this poem, Rumi uses several metaphors— the individual is likened to a a guest house and emotions as its occupants. It’s a challenging transposition and has taken me a fair bit of time to arrive at a suitable composition,” she says. The act, which has about 20 members of her troupe performing in it, is set to premiere in mid-December, around her husband’s birthday. “It’s a piece which is close to my heart because of the relevance of its message in the contemporary context. I hope I am able to do justice to it,” she says.