Thirkan Dance & Music Academy
1st floor, Cape Club, 2, Supertech Capetown, Sector 74, Noida, Uttar Pradesh 201301, India
http://www.thirkandanceacademy.com/
Thirkan Dance & Music Academy feels less like a conventional school and more like an ever-evolving living culture. Housed in a restored 1960s theatre in the old quarter, the building’s façade still carries the faint art-deco curves of its cinema days, but once you pass the brass-handled doors you are greeted by floor-to-ceiling murals of lesser-known Indian folk instruments—gopichands, Algozey, and pung—as if announcing that forgotten voices will find space here. Interior architect Sandhya Menon purposely preserved exposed brick walls and Catalan vault ceilings; the uneven surfaces act as acoustic diffusers, giving every tabla bol or ghungroo strike a warm, chiselled reverberation.
Classes are conducted in six barrel-vaulted studios named after rivers—Narmada, Godavari, Mahanadi, Teesta, Brahmaputra, Sindhu—each fitted with special pine-sprung floors that soften the impact of vigorous Kathak tatkaar yet still respond crisply to chhau leaps. Embedded LED strips change hue according to raga: Yaman bathes students in indigo, while Hamsadhwani floods the room in sunrise-amber. The academy’s pièce de résistance, however, is the “Riyaz Pod,” a spherical cedar chamber suspended beneath the roof; musicians use it for dawn-meditation alaap because the concave walls generate a six-second decay that makes even a single tanpura string hover like a ghost.
Course offerings are uncompromisingly inter-disciplinary. A typical junior batch spends four mornings on Bharatanatyam araimandi drills, two afternoons on Hindustani vocal, and one session on Konnakol recitation. Senior diploma candidates must present a collaborative project: past efforts have included a flamenco-Kathak fusion narrative on climate change, scored for Sarod and cajón, and a multimedia piece combining Mizos’ Cheraw bamboo dance with electronic-loop Dhrupad. Every quarter, the academy invites one rural master—recently, the 83-year-old Nakkeerar Parai drummer from rural Tamil Nadu—and devotes the main studio to a 30-hour intensive where city learners literally live, cook, and rehearse alongside the guru.
Public engagement happens via the Thursday “Baithak Below” evenings: at 8.30 p.m. the foyer garage shutters roll up into a street-side stage; rickshaw-pullers pause for chai, students cycle in for free, a modest Nagara drum signals the start, and fifty squatting listeners become the front row. Admission is donation-only, proceeds funding the “Taalmel Scholarship” for underprivileged girls—currently 27 recipients learning sitar in parallel with coding boot-camps.
Administratively, Thirkan is a trust, not a profit centre. Adviser members include Oscar-winning sound engineer Resul Pookutty and street-theatre pioneer Safdar Hashmi’s daughter. Annual intake is capped at 120 students; auditions weigh 60 % on the ability to clap complex tihai patterns in reverse. The building shuts at 10 p.m., but you often see silhouettes on the roof—the scent of jasmine from the terrace garden mixing with faint tanpura drones—because, as founder Kapila Krishnamoorthy likes to say, “rhythm lingers longer than the hand that plays it.”
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- Published: July 27, 2025
