Host Rachel Hopkin moderates a conversation between Dublin, Ohio-based Smitha Magal and Priya Murle of Chennai, India. Both women are dancers and teachers of one of India’s oldest classical dance traditions, Bharatanatyam, and senior disciples of renowned dancer Sudharani Raghupathy.

After some years teaching in her native India, Smitha Magal formed her own dance school SILAMBAM in 1992 after moving to Dublin, Ohio. Smitha is originally from Chennai in India, where she met and studied alongside Priya Murle, her long-time friend and colleague. Murle was a senior teacher at Shree Bharatalaya prior to founding the Shri Silambam Academy of Fine Arts in 2012 in Chennai.

Covid Conversations is a podcast series from the Center for Folklore Studies at the Ohio State University in which artists and humanities professionals from Ohio and their counterparts elsewhere in the world discuss how their lives and work have been affected by the Coronavirus pandemic.

The series is funded by an OSU Global Arts and Humanities Discovery Theme grant and distributed by Ohio Humanities. It is produced and presented by radio producer and folklorist Rachel Hopkin and mastered by Paul Kotheimer at OSU.

Music for this podcast is provided by Pixabay.

For more about the Center for Folklore Studies, where the full recordings of each episode will be archived along with contextual information about each episode, please visit cfs.osu.edu.

To learn more about Ohio Humanities podcasts and other projects and programs, please visit ohiohumanities.org.