Why Harini Nilakantan sees dance as a great unifier
By fusing the Indian classical dance of Bharatanatyam with street dance, she is using her body as a way to culturally connect with others
Harini Nilakantan recently competed at the Red Bull Dance Your Style Las Vegas Qualifier.
Red Bull Media House
Words by Samantha Pak
The story goes that when Harini Nilakantan was in the womb, her mother could feel her rhythmically kick to whatever music her mother used to play.
And once she came into the world, that story continued. Growing up in India, Nilakantan’s home was filled with many different types of music—from Indian classical music, Bollywood, and Asha Bhosle, to western styles and artists including new jack swing, Michael Jackson, Frank Sinatra, and Carlos Santana. Nilakantan has been told that when she was about 2 years old, she used to bounce differently based on the songs’ different tempos. By the time she was 4, her mother put her in a Bharatanatyam—an Indian classical dance form—class after Nilakantan watched her cousin learn the basics and would follow along. “So they're like, ‘Oh, this kid really likes moving, so we'll put her in there,’” Nilakantan says about how she got her start.
Now 26, the Chicago resident has never stopped dancing, and can be seen fusing her classical Indian training with street dancing to create a style all her own.
I recently spoke with Nilakantan about where she got the idea to combine the two styles together, how people have responded to her, and seeing dance as a great unifier.
This interview has been edited for clarity and length.
Samantha Pak: What is your earliest memory of thinking, “I love to dance?”
Harini Nilakantan: We used to watch a lot of MTV, so whenever music videos came on, I saw the “Black Or White” music video by Michael Jackson. And there was this scene where there's an Indian dancer with him, and I used to try to mimic her, and I just loved it. But also at the same time, there was an actor named Hrithik Roshan, and there's a song called “Main Aisa Kyun Hoon” in a Bollywood movie named Lakshya, and he does these crazy sequences. It’s got some locking and popping in it. I just really wanted to be like them.
SP: What kind of dance did you start with?
HN: That would be Bharatanatyam. My first guru was Sujatha Ragavendra when I was living in Bangalore. I learned all my basics from her. And while that was happening, our schools always used to have annual day functions. So we'd have choreography—sometimes it'll be Broadway adjacent, sometimes it'll just be a Bollywood movie choreography. So I had a healthy mix of cultural dance, and pop culture. But the very first style I learned and still train in to this day is Bharatanatyam.
SP: What has made you stick with this style of dancing?
HN: I just feel very drawn to it. It's going to be a weird-sounding answer. I feel very connected with my body when I do that style. There are some movements that just feel good within. Maybe it's because this is the first dance style I've always known. But I don't remember having a time when I didn't feel in touch with myself when I was dancing. There's always been a love-hate relationship with what is happening with the dance. But when I'm dancing, when I'm practicing, or learning from my guru, it just always feels very much aligned. I feel free doing it.
SP: Can you explain and describe what this style of dance is?
HN: Bharatanatyam is a codified classical Indian dance style from South India, Tamil Nadu. It comes from Sadir Attam, an old storytelling-based dance form that was practiced by hereditary dancers. So there were these large families that used to create compositions and pass them down in the tradition. They used to be performing-arts families.
How it evolved in the past 200 years is that a lot of practitioners, at least and specifically Rukmini Devi Arundale, I'm going to say around the 30s, had a lot of influences from ballet, from the Nautch Movement in British India, and then it became a little sanitized and more geared towards spiritual and religious Bhakti movement. But the dance form itself is rooted in storytelling, and rooted in making the music visible. It has lots of tumultuous but also pure histories inside it. It's a very complex dance style. It's predominantly a depictive dance form.
SP: How did it come for you to combine this cultural traditional dance with street dancing?
HN: This is a very vivid memory. I remember wanting to fuse or wanting to try to do both, with this one track called “The Flute Song.” It's by this artist named Remo Fernandes. It came out in 1998. I was born in ‘98, but my mom really loved this album. So in the 2000s, 2001-3, I used to go to different competitions. And I’d try to perform. Usually I'd only do one style. I'd only do choreography to Bollywood music. But when this song came on, I just felt like, because it was just percussion and the flute, it gave me a lot of freedom to try to practice doing adavus, building blocks of Bharatanatyam, different hand gestures, and then combine that with some footwork, or this James Brown-esque slide.
So that was my first idea. I wanted to blend these two in a competition. My mom was there, and she was just like, “Maybe keep the classical out of this.” [Laughs] Just because she thought that it wouldn't really resonate back then. But I always wanted to try to experiment and see how my body can respond to different beats. I was very young. I always wanted to see if my two worlds could combine into one.
SP: When were you actually able to combine the two?
HN: It would not be until 2015-16, and there was a talent show at my high school. I remember me and this other dancer, their name is Sonia. They had done ballet, and so it was a call and response, and I'd done that as my first-ever talent show here in the States. I didn't get to experiment with fusion until I came here to the States. That's how it naturally happened. I came here and I saw the opportunities, because I was already training and learning in different street styles. And I was like, “Wait, there's so many connections. This reminds me of this in my dance style. What if I just do them back to back?”
SP: What has been the response when you started competing it?
HN: It's been mainly love from people who see it in person. Obviously, not everyone's going to love everything that you do. Sometimes it'll be a little frosty, but I've just been blessed and privileged enough that people understand what I'm doing and they appreciate it.
Obviously, when you put something online, there's going to be a polarizing opinion about it, but for the most part, I think it's a testament to how I approach it, hopefully, that it makes sense. They are seeing what I'm trying to paint. My goal is to always amplify what I'm hearing with my body. So if the music is flowing through my body, how I'm presenting it to you, you can hear what I'm hearing. Because my whole idea is to culturally connect.
There's so many people who practice this dance form. And whenever we go to battles, it’s not something you see. You'd have a higher chance of seeing someone do some ballet sequences or some acro but you wouldn't necessarily see something like this. So I wanted to try to bring a little bit of visibility to a dance style that is very rigorous in its training. It's very meticulous.
SP: What have been some of your favorite moments throughout your dancing career?
HN: I love being on stage. I feel like, “I'm here. It's my duty to entertain. It's my duty to show you.” But my most memorable moments have always been in rehearsals. I love seeing other dancers figure out what I'm doing, and then we come together and it feels like one big unit—like we're breathing together. That's one of my favorite moments. I love watching the lightbulb turn on like, “Oh! This is not that far from what I do!”
I love ciphering. I just love the exchange where we have circles in parties or circles at shows after and we’re just going in, then I get to do my little jig for about a minute, and then I turn around, find another person I'm gonna pull into the circle and pass it on. I love the energy exchange.
Harini Nilakantan fuses Bharatanatyam with contemporary street dance to create a style all her own.
Red Bull Media House
SP: What have been some of the challenges over the years that you've dealt with?
HN: Obviously it's the lack of understanding. I feel like nowadays, people don't have much patience for something different. The challenges have been a lot of misconstrued takes on what I'm trying to do. My goal is to fuse correctly. It's to give respect to anything that I'm doing. Dancing is something so pure, and something that belongs to everybody because it's a mode of expression. So it hurts to see all of those quick takes when they're like, “Oh, she's cheapening this dance form,” or “She's taking it into spaces where it doesn't belong.”
Why are we suddenly putting in stopgaps to where it belongs? Are you saying an art form can only belong in a temple? Are you saying an art form can only belong to a certain caste or creed? We sound exactly like what we're not trying to be. We sound discriminatory. We sound villainizing. And that's what I'm trying to remove. I want it to be accessible. I want people to learn what Bharatanatyam is in its entirety—the greatest parts and the ugliest parts, because that's what happens when a dance form evolves over 200 years. It's so poignantly political, what art can do.
If people only associate Indian classical dance with religion, we are doing a giant disservice to the dance style itself and its entire history behind it. I wish that that wasn't the case, but I also was very well mentally prepared for that blowback.
SP: Was there anything else you wanted to add?
HN: I just want to put out the message that dance is something that I see as a unifier. I just really want people to understand that what I'm trying to do is show you how I move and how I can exist in these different spaces. We don't have to be fragmented all the time. We're already in a very divisive time. So I just hope that we can try to come together again as a people. I'm only one person, but I hope that someone else can see what I'm doing and my movement resonates.
Published on May 12, 2026
Words by Samantha Pak
Samantha Pak (she/her) is an award-winning Cambodian American journalist from the Seattle area and co-editor in chief for JoySauce. She spends more time than she’ll admit shopping for books than actually reading them, and has made it her mission to show others how amazing Southeast Asian people are. Follow her on Twitter at @iam_sammi and on Instagram at @sammi.pak.