Savitha Sastry is an Indian dancer and choreographer. She is best known as an exponent of Bharatanatyam dance of India.
Savitha Sastry is the founder-director of Sai Shree Arts, a dance company known to experiment with the format of traditional Bharatanatyam dance, by using the techniques of Bharatanatyam to showcase theme based productions based on novel stories, not based on Indian mythology or religion.
Savitha Subramaniam was born in Hyderabad, and later lived in Mumbai before her family relocated to their home town of Chennai. She started her training in Bharatanatyam under the tutelage of Guru Mahalingam Pillai at the Sri Rajarajeswari Bharatha Natya Kala Mandir in Mumbai, and later with Adyar K Lakshman and the Dhananjayans in Chennai. She did her schooling at the P.S Senior Secondary School in Chennai, and her graduation from Stella Maris College.
In 1986, she featured as the lead dancer in the Tamil film Ananda Tandavam, a production of her Guru Adyar K Lakshman. She pursued her master's degree in the United States, where she majored in neuroscience.
Productions of Savitha Sastry
All the productions of Savitha Sastry have been based on short stories by her husband AK Srikanth and the soundtrack for the productions have been composed by Rajkumar Bharathi, the great grandson of the veteran poet Subramania Bharathi. These have been performed in several countries, and the productions have met with critical and popular acclaim. Another hallmark of Savitha's presentations is a Q & A session that she and Srikanth have with the audience at the end of the performance where the audience discuss the presentation with the performer and writer. Since 2018, Sastry and AK Srikanth have been releasing their productions on free to stream digital platforms to take their work to a world audience. They also produce short classical dance videos that narrate a unique story, on the same lines of popular music videos. The short films have been nominated in over 50 film festivals across the world.
Their first release, The Descent was based on the story of a fallen superstar, and dealt with themes of depression. The film was awarded the Best Short Film 2019 at the Calcutta International Cult Film Festival, The Top Shorts Awards, the Near Nazareth Festival and the Best Global Short. It was also nominated at the John Abraham International Short Film Festival, the 5th Jaipur Film World 2021, Venice Film Awards, Cannes Short Film Festival, FilmFest by Rogue Dancer, Open Window International Film Challenge, Conceptsion International Film Awards, Mumbai 9th Indian Cine Festival 2021, the 11th Dada Saheb Phalke Film Festival 2021, Florence Film Awards, and the First Time Filmmaker Sessions.
