About the Company

The emergence of Balbir Singh Dance Company onto the national and international stage comes at a time when our understanding of cultural identities is undergoing profound change at all levels of society and in all realms; the economic, the personal and the social as well as the artistic. This general unraveling of previously accepted categories has led to new forms of expression and new modes of discourse, especially in the arts where practitioners seek to express themselves in ways that reflect the transcultural reality of their experience.

Balbir Singh Dance Company makes a significant contribution to the Arts Council’s mission of ‘Great art for everyone’.

“An exciting dance company with choreography that finds a synergy between Kathak and western contemporary styles.” Andy Carver, Executive Director, Arts Council England Yorkshire

Our Mission:

Balbir Singh Dance Company exists to create dynamic dance through a synthesis of Kathak, live music and contemporary dance.

The company was established in 1997 as Diversity Dance, changing its name in 2008 to reflect the fact that its sole purpose is to create and present the work of Balbir Singh.

Balbir Singh trained at the Northern School of Contemporary Dance in Leeds. He went on to learn the principles of Kathak dance under Akram Khan and then Guru Pratap Pawar. Balbir’s work brings together the skills, disciplines and traditions of Kathak with the less constraining possibilities of contemporary dance. Always working with original live music, the work challenges dancers to explore their musicality as well as their physicality.

Balbir Singh’s own personal history mirrors the changes in cultural identity which his work explores. Growing up as a British boy in two northern English cities, with almost entirely western cultural influences and models, the young Balbir Singh had little time for his Sikh heritage, and came late to the world of North Indian traditional dance. In fact, Balbir Singh only started to learn about the Kathak tradition as an adult, when asked (no doubt on the basis of the colour of his skin) if he could develop ‘some Indian dance’ for a British dance company. Commentators will search in vain to find in Balbir Singh’s work evidence of England’s famously complex relationship with India. Balbir Singh himself is adamant that his was a cross-cultural upbringing, except in his case the two cultures were Bradford and Leeds. And he pinpoints his move from insular Bradford to cosmopolitan Leeds as being the biggest spur to his eventual creative direction. With this highly individual take on the meaning of cultures it is hardly surprising that the work of Balbir Singh Dance Company is seen as more post-structural than post-colonial. Even the centrality of Kathak in the company’s work stems more from Balbir Singh’s fascination for its numerical systems than from any religious motivation.