Press/News

-Suman Adisesh
Creative Director of Spandha School of Dance and Creative Arts. 

Stepping away from the traditional expectations of this art form and creating her own path has inspired me to take risks in my own career. Maya has taught me, through example, that boundaries aren’t fixed and to not box myself in to a particular way of doing something.

I teach these same lessons to my own students today, and see elements of Maya’s mentorship in all of my work. I also strive to find new patterns of movement and modes of expression now. For example, I just did a dance about the sun rising and falling in the day. Rather than relating it to a fixed narrative, I created imagery and embodied it myself. Rather than showing sprouts sprouting through gestures, I became the sprouts myself. It’s Maya’s vision that has inspired me to approach movement this way.
–BY SONALI SKANDAN, AS TOLD TO HALEY HILTON, Dance Magazine, November 19, 2021

“Also, Bharatanatyam has well and truly entered the 21st century as it engages with an increasingly wide range of themes and ideas, pushing into thought-provoking political and socio-cultural realms, the abstract and the concrete, and embracing the myths, stories and issues of the world at large.”

“The dancing, by all four dancers, was absolutely top-notch. The choreography was outstanding, and the whole production was tightly woven together and perfectly executed.”
-Kamini Dandapani, Narthaki.com, 2019

“Each of these women, as horsemen/ humans, chose a role, and their sufferings measured whether they were worthy of it. From being a lover to being a mother, it is a tricky question to ask if suffering is deserved or necessary because, in the end, it simply is apart of life. Yet, Four Horsemen asked its audience to see pain like a roadblock; it only hinders path until you, finally, finish building over it.”
-Diandra Reviews, Diandra Reviews It All, 2019

‘The Four Horsemen’ by Jiva Performing Arts, New York, was an intriguing production that raised anticipation. It depicted the four vignettes of life and death – conquest, war, famine and death. It was choreographed by Sonali Skandan and Maya Kulkarni with music by Rajkumar Bharathi. The four dancers Sonali Skandan, Aishwarya Madhav, Amrita Doshi and Bharathi Penneswaran were at their artistic best. The group choreography focused and coordinated with musical patterns. The energy of the quartet provided a beautiful climax. Sonali Skandan did a wonderful job of infusing traditional art form to present something abstract and the experience was unique.
–Jayashree Anand, Anita Sanjeeva review of American Natya Festival St. Louis, MO, Narthaki.com, 2019

“The choreography was an impressive blending of the strength inherent in the technical aspects of the form and the exuberant emotions that exist in the stories being told…Her [Sonali Skandan] charisma on stage permeated every piece and drew the eyes of the audience as she shifted her gaze in conjunction with the movement.”
-Annie Woller, eyeondance.org, 2014

How poignantly, how keenly, Sonali, Aparna and Rithika brought to life the aching sadness, the loneliness, the everlasting unsettledness that are always there in a corner of every immigrant’s heart. Watching them brought back a rush of memories from my own days as a young mother newly arrived in America. That is the power of good theater. And like life, it was not all desolation and pathos.”
– Kamini Dandapani, 2025

“The production shines in its attention to recognizable snippets of immigrant life: cooking,oiling of hair, waiting for news, and receiving a letter (usually an aerogram) from home resonated deeply –the sharp pain of a mother combing tangled hair had many women in the audience laughing and flinching in recognition. The small details of cooking – putting water on the tava before cooking chapati– come from an observed knowledge and memory of all three dancers. The dancers, all immigrants or daughters of immigrants,are extremely gifted performers who hold these layered, generational stories with both grace and tenderness.”
– Aditi Dhruv, 2025