Rina Singha was among the first to introduce a range of performing arts from her native India to Canada.Courtesy of Dance Collection Danse
When classical Indian Kathak dancer Rina Singha began a performance, her thaat was a sight to behold. As she stood straight at centre stage, her hands curved out in the signature stance, she undulated. Her delicate movements – from the lowering and lifting of her kohl-rimmed eyes to her fluttering fingertips – were spellbinding. She wore an ethereal aquamarine anarkali kurta (long, flared tunic) and churidaar (tight pants) and a pink dupatta (scarf) draped gossamer-like around her torso.
Whether at a dance festival in Montreal, an intimate theatre in Toronto or even in practice, Ms. Singha was mesmerizing, says Deepti Gupta, 64, a fellow Kathak dancer. Ms. Gupta was a teenager when she sought out Ms. Singha to learn the Indian classical dance. Ms. Singha was one of the first masters to introduce a range of Indian performing arts – Kathak, folk dances and music – on the Canadian mainstage, laying the groundwork for other elders such as Menaka Thakkar, Janak Khendry and Joanna De Souza. Unable to take on Ms. Gupta as a student, Ms. Singha nevertheless became a lifelong mentor to her and many others.
Rina Singha died on Sept. 1 at a palliative care facility in Toronto, after being diagnosed with lung cancer this past summer. She was 88. Ms. Singha leaves her husband, Ray Joshua; daughter Sunita Reddy; sisters Anita Sarkar and Rekha Kapila; and many nieces and nephews. Ms. Singha was predeceased by her daughter Vinita Reddy, and sister Onilla Singha.
Rina Singha’s portrait from her induction into the 2018 Dance Collection Danse Hall of Fame.Liliana Reyes/Dance Collection Danse
“The way she did her dora [slow neck movements], her eyes, it was magic. That style – only her generation knew. That thehraav [stillness], and the way her whole body would sway gently, it was just something else,” Ms. Gupta says. Ms. Singha was like a matriarch, Ms. Gupta adds, who kept an eye on the community she had built around her. “She kept me honest, as a dancer. To dance in front of her, you had to know your foundation.”
But there’s another image of Ms. Singha, familiar to those who had a chance to meet or work with her. Ms. Gupta calls it her “personal, huggable” memory of Ms. Singha, stumbling out of the Queen Street streetcar in downtown Toronto, cocooned in a winter coat and boots, a long scarf wrapped around her neck, laden with several bags and a big boombox, in search of a hot cup of black tea – often at Tim Hortons.
“Rina and her bags. She always had so many bags,” says Eddie Kastrau, a contemporary dancer, who first met Ms. Singha in 1986, when he joined the Danny Grossman Dance Company. Mr. Kastrau worked on several of Ms. Singha’s projects with Mr. Grossman, who had taught alongside Ms. Singha at the York University dance department in the 1970s.
“She was so open with the audience when she danced. She communicated with every part of her body. Her eyes really reached out to you,” Mr. Kastrau says. “She always had a good word for everybody. She was always smiling, even in the face of adversities.”
Born into an Anglican family on Jan. 7, 1937, in Calcutta, India, Ms. Singha was the third of five daughters, one of whom died in infancy, according to a profile in Dance Collection Danse magazine. Her father was an engineer in the flour mill construction industry, while her mother, who majored in history and economics, taught at the college level.
Both parents travelled and lived in different cities across India, often running separate households. Ms. Singha and her sisters attended boarding schools run by Christian missions. During school vacations, the sisters visited each parent’s separate home, which taught them to be self-reliant, Ms. Singha said in the magazine interview.
Academically gifted, she was 14 when she entered Osmania University in Hyderabad, a city in southern India, to work toward a master’s degree in geography. She graduated with full honours when she was 20, but couldn’t get hired as a lecturer because she was underage.
Shortly after India’s independence from British rule in 1947, the government opened schools of classical music and dance for educated young women to learn the arts. Stalwart artists, formerly under royal patronage, were employed in these new schools to teach small batches of students from across India. Ms. Singha was among the first students to learn from the Kathak legend Pandit Shambhu Maharaj at New Delhi’s Bharatiya Kala Kendra. Other maestros such as the Dagar Brothers or Hafiz Ali Khan would frequently drop in to the classes.
“I was just in the right place at the right time. We didn’t even know who these gurus were, and they would treat us like their own children,” Ms. Singha told this reporter in an interview this past summer. “It was an unbelievably innocent time. I am glad I lived through it.”
Ms. Singha in England in 1965.Courtesy of Dance Collection Danse
In 1960, Ms. Singha enrolled at the London School of Economics to pursue a PhD in geography. While studying, she also joined the dance company of the famous dancer Ram Gopal, performing with him and as a soloist across Europe.
At university she met Upendar Reddy, who was pursuing a Bachelor of Commerce degree, and he became her first husband. She discontinued her studies after the birth of her daughter Vinita in 1963. The family immigrated to Canada in 1965.
Once settled in Toronto, Ms. Singha met Canadian dance luminaries such as Celia Franca and Miriam Adams, and started to perform. In 1967, she published Indian Dance: Their History and Growth, with British writer and critic Reginald Massey. Her second daughter, Sunita, was born in 1969.
Being an immigrant artist in a country where audiences, and even peers, were ignorant about the deep pedagogical practices of the Indian classical arts was challenging. Ms. Singha abandoned her dreams to pursue postgraduate studies, and taught geography and dance in Toronto schools.
Meanwhile, her daughter Vinita was diagnosed with incurable deafness. Although Vinita was in a specialized school, Ms. Singha didn’t want her to learn sign language. Instead, Ms. Singha painstakingly taught her elder daughter to communicate verbally, according to her younger daughter, Sunita Reddy, who recalls the countless nights her mother spent poring over words with Vinita.
The girls would come home for lunch to find their sandwiches cut in jigsaw pieces. At the start of every school year, Ms. Singha knitted them new sets of gloves, hats and scarves. Ms. Singha’s first husband, Mr. Reddy, loved sports and she also became a big fan of hockey, Ms. Reddy adds.
“Every Saturday night, we watched Hockey Night in Canada as a family,” she says.
However, the couple had an acrimonious relationship. They divorced in 1980, and Ms. Singha moved back downtown. The girls lived with their father in the suburbs to complete school. Vinita eventually moved in with Ms. Singha to attend George Brown College. Sunita visited her mother every weekend.
“She’d make my favourite food. Take us to places we wanted to go, like the Hitching Post. When she was travelling, she would write letters to let us know what she was up to,” Sunita Reddy says.
Kathak was central to Ms. Singha’s varied career. She volunteered to design dance-based programs for deaf children and developed a multiculturalism-focused educational program for school visits to help immigrant children appreciate their cultural identities. She was also an arts advocate. She was a consultant for the Canada Council, headed multicultural programs with the Ontario Arts Council, and chaired the Toronto Arts Council’s dance committee from 2002 to 2005.
Ms. Singha performs at the Royal Ontario Museum in Toronto in 1966.Courtesy of Dance Collection Danse
“When I was in grade school, she came to my class as a guest teacher. My friends loved her. She’d pick a country and teach us basic facts about it like the geography and culture. We’d learn folk dances from the country. Sometimes she would bring snacks from the country,” Ms. Reddy says.
In 1970, Ms. Singha joined York University, which then offered Canada’s first degree program in dance. She taught dance and a theory course at the university until 1976.
By the time she was living on her own, Ms. Singha had earned a master’s degree in education at the Ontario Institute for Studies in Education.
In 1982, she founded the Kathak Institute in Toronto, teaching a handful of students. In 1992, she founded the Rina Singha Kathak Dance Organization. Following in the tradition of her own gurus, Ms. Singha was not interested in managing large classes of students. Keen to share Kathak’s rich tradition and encourage new talent, she ran the annual showcase Kathak Mahotsav from 2008 to 2018. She received many awards and accolades over the years, including induction into the Canadian Dance Hall of Fame in 2018. On a personal front, Ms. Singha remarried in 2012, to Ray Joshua, a fellow congregant at the Anglican Church she attended.
While Ms. Singha continued to dance and choreograph into her 80s, her most significant contribution was also her most personal. A deeply devout Anglican, she started working on telling Biblical stories through Kathak in the late 1970s.
In 1988, she produced Yesu Katha, which told the stories of four women from the Bible: Eve, the Woman at the Well, Mary Magdalene and Mary, the mother of Jesus.
Whenever she faced an obstacle, whether it was the lack of funding, less than ideal performance venues, or finding an audience, she kept her faith, says Shanta Chikarmane, a long-time student, who helped organize Ms. Singha’s personal and professional life.
“Like many artists, Rina didi [an honorific for an older sister] was very forgetful. Doctor visits, medicines. The order of a dance program. She’d forget,” Ms. Chikarmane says. “She wasn’t interested in money. Often she didn’t pay herself, so long as other artists got paid. ‘The Lord will provide.’ She always said that. And somehow, we always managed.”
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