<P>Andrea Rowe - Ottawa Citizen, 06/21/01:<BR> <BLOCKQUOTE><font size="1" face="Verdana, Arial">quote:</font><HR><B>Sabbatical in India benefits choreographer</B><P>Four years ago, some people in the dance world thought choreographer Deepti Gupta had lost her mind. <P>There aren't too many people in Canada who can say they've been commissioned by the Canada Dance Festival one year and National Arts Centre the next (the latter including a juicy residency in Banff), but Gupta was one of them. It seemed she had made it -- yet after the pieces were produced, she returned to India to study, saying she needed to immerse herself in advanced technical dance training with her guru, the esteemed Indian teacher who guides dancers through their careers and often life itself. <P>"People were saying to me, 'How could you do this when you were up here?'" she says, gesturing far above her head. "But I couldn't see where I was going from there, and people didn't understand that going there for me had been a leap, that there was a whole bunch of stuff missing. ... Other people were much more supportive, though. They understood that I had to follow my intuition, saying it would eventually sort itself out." <HR></BLOCKQUOTE><B>more...</B><P><BR>