Abhibhavan Dance Studio
Block-E, Eldeco Mystic Greens, Omicron I, Block E, Greater Noida, Uttar Pradesh 201310, India
Tucked behind a nondescript gate on the third floor of a century-old banya wool-warehouse in Ahmedabad’s Kalupur quarter, Abhibhavan Dance Studio is less a building and more a living organism. The former loom hall—thirteen-meter beams still smelling faintly of lanolin—has been left almost naked: brickwork stripped to biscuit tan, skylights scraped free of paint so gold afternoon sun drips in shafts across a sprung maple floor that was burnished with coconut oil instead of varnish. A single black-and-red tanpura from Maihar leans in one bay window; beneath it, rolled grass mats from Kerala wait like secret scrolls.
Every surface breathes tradition, but technology has been invited to the party. Overhead, four telescopic aluminum frames carry broadband-proof LED panels that can dim to the color of ghee-flame for a thumri or extinguish into blackout for an abstract nritta phrase. Contact microphones are embedded beneath every third plank so the dancers’ footfalls can be looped, granulated, or answered by the modular synth rack that sits modestly beside the harmonium stand. Owner-choreographer Ananya Jhaveri likes to say that Abhibhavan “wraps ancestral memory in a circuit board.”
There are two primary classrooms: the smaller, left in its original uneven brick, is reserved for Khajuraho-style sculpturesque abhinaya and Friday-evening storytelling salons where local poets spin Gujarati ghazals over ghungroo loops. The larger hall, fitted with the Raag-Rasa responsive flooring and a 360-degree spatial-audio dodecahedron, hosts everything from Bharatnatyam repertoire workshops to techno-bharatanatyam premieres that sell out three nights before poster release.
Visitors enter through a narrow foyer sculpted from re-cycled teak looms. Shoes come off, phones go into numbered khadi pouches, and a hand-inked sign reminds you, “Walk soft; the building remembers its own footsteps.” Beyond the foyer, a library room smells of parchment and nutmeg—shelves groan under 6,000 rare dance notations, including a palm-leaf folio of Jaidev’s Ashtapadi annotated in miniature Devanagari, and a row of first-edition Rukmini Devi photographs smelling faintly of camphor. Members can borrow scores across disciplines; the only condition is that you annotate your margin insights in indigo ink so that future borrowers can trace lineage.
The café counter uses the honor system: drop coins for nimbu-pani or turmeric espresso; the ledger is an old music-ruled notebook. Once a month, on Purnima, the studio hosts Raag-Rave nights: musicians plug into the floor mics, dancers trigger subwoofers by stamping tisra nadai, and the ceiling LEDs pick up the spectral centroid of a raga and rain color onto moving bodies.
Stringent admission requires neither lineage nor examination—only that you spend an hour observing class before committing. Ananya believes you should fall in love with the room’s light, the way the old beams catch the ankle bell mid-air, and the moment when a child’s first aramandi makes the building itself sigh.
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- Published: August 4, 2025
