INDIA:	Sharon Lowen, The Dance of Discovery

By Lea Terhune

Graceful and sinuous, large eyes reminiscent of images of Indian goddesses, Sharon Lowen has enthralled Indian audiences for two decades with her dance. Her accomplishment is extraordinary in a place where foreign exponents of indigenous dance forms are rarely taken seriously. But once Lowen came to India 25 years ago and devoted herself to Indian classical dance, her tenacity and perfectionism have earned the respect of audiences and critics alike in her adopted country.

Lowen grew up in Detroit, where her father was a chemical engineer and her mother a clinical psychologist. Indian family friends introduced her to Indian culture at an early age, and her academic career at Michigan gave her an exposure to Asian arts that nudged her toward India.

Lowen lives in New Delhi with her 17-year-old daughter, Tara, in a barsati, which means "raincoat" in Hindi and describes an apartment house's uppermost suite, which catches all the rain. Lowen's barsati in the heart of the city was part of an ancestral mansion now divided into flats. Seated on the terrace, Lowen recalls her early days in college.

"The U of M made my coming to India possible in a multitude of ways," she says. "When I arrived in 1967, I was extremely fortunate to come in contact with that great man Otto Graf. He was the director of the Honors College, and he admitted me into the College even though I was a little weak in math. Through the Honors College I was able to create an undergraduate program that let me explore my interest in Asia and Asian performing arts at the undergraduate level." Such curricular freedom was very unusual at that time, she adds.

No non-Western training in the arts existed at the University back then, according to Lowen, but plenty of South Asian experts passed through. And she already had a firm foundation for her program. She had taken classes at the Detroit Institute of Arts in puppetry, mime and theater since childhood, was a member of the Detroit Puppetry Guild even before entering high school and had performed with the Detroit and Cleveland symphony orchestras.

Her classes in dance were eclectic, including ballet, Haitian, Spanish and Balinese, but she was attracted to Indian dance because it provided an opportunity for deep study of a classical tradition. She pursued this interest with faculty experts like William Malm in the School of Music, with whom she studied ethnomusicology; the historian of Indian art Walter Spink; John Broomfield, who gave her a grounding in Indian history; and Padmanaben Jaini, a specialist in Sanskrit literature and the Hindu and Jainist religions.

Equally important was a small ad she noticed for Manipuri dance classes offered at the Ann Arbor YMCA. Manipuri dance evolved from folk and martial dances in Manipur, northeastern Indian state that borders on Burma. "I knew what Manipuri was, but only from books," Lowen says, "so I was delighted to take more Indian dance besides the occasional master class." The instructor was a local Bengali dancer, Minati Roy. Lowen's work with Roy opened doors to the Indian community in Ann Arbor as she was drawn into dancing for various Indian functions.

So when Lowen, who took her triple-major BA in humanities, fine arts and Asian studies in 1971, finally got to India on a Fulbright scholarship in 1973, she was not entering unfamiliar territory. "India for me was never exotic," she says. But getting there wasn't easy. She tried to get a Fulbright fresh out of college, but Indo-American relations suddenly soured over the Nixon administration's diplomatic "tilt" toward Pakistan, and India stopped granting visas. So while the Fulbright was on hold, Lowen earned a master's degree in education and dance, receiving it in 1973.

"Ann Arbor has one of the best dance programs anywhere," she recalls. "What was wonderful was not just that you got good training, but also the tremendous supportiveness for the students and faculty at that time. We were so well-trained that whatever you did, you did well, whether it was Cunningham, Graham, Falco, Nikolai or, for me, Asian dance."

The only thing Michigan didn't prepare for her, Lowen says, was "the politics of art, and I think that naivete has saved me from despair, possibly." When she arrived in India, she explains, she had no idea about the connections necessary for most performers to make it here. "Initially I didn't realize that people think of a foreigner, 'Isn't it flattering that they like our culture, but they can't do it.' I was just dancing. But over the years I've really been fortunate to achieve a unique kind of stature where I'm not only respected as an artist, I'm respected as a person in the community in a society that is rather feudal in the forms of patronage compared with the way it is in the West. India is the kind of place where people aren't going to begin to take you seriously until after 10 or 15 years. But after that, when you have the stamina and have actually racked up the achievements, then you have a very good position."