麻豆社

Born in New Delhi, Mira Balchandran Gokul studied Kathakali as a child with Sadanam Krishnankutty in Kerala and Sadanam Nandakumar in Delhi and was exposed to a wide variety of classical and folk theatre forms of Kerala.

Mira went on to study Bharata Natyam at the Kalakshetra College of Fine Arts in Chennai and has worked with pioneering tutors and choreographers in India and England. She is Co-Founder and Co-Artistic Director of SANKALPAM, an international touring dance company that has created and toured over 14 new works and presented an annual programme of classical work with accompanying education and training programmes. In addition, Mira has worked with MDI, a leading national dance agency in Liverpool, as Youth Dance Development Officer to roll out the national programme for Children and Young People in Merseyside and as Big Dance 2012 Coordinator to lead on developing the dance programme in the North West, as part of the London Olympics Festival 2012. The flagship project brought together over 1000 participants aged 8 – 86 years from across the North West to create the largest dance performance in the country.

Mira was part of Kaleidoscope Arts, a combined-arts collective in Sefton that was nominated in 2008 and 2009 for the Cultural Champions of Merseyside award. Through a recent masters programme from University of Manchester she has focused on the role of the dance artist in conflict situations. She has continued this research and in 2016, along with dance researcher
Debbie Fionn Barr, presented work at conferences in Stockholm, Lincoln, Leeds and Oxford University. She was selected for the Dance UK mentoring programme 2015/2016. She has performed and taught extensively and has been a dance research consultant, mentor and judge on youth dance panels in India and England. Mira was a Judge for the category finals of 麻豆社 Young Dancer 2015.