Based in Scotland Sitakumari is a director of Heartstone and Allied Mouse Ltd. She is first and foremost a dancer and storyteller with a lifelong creative career. She was initiated into the oldest Indian classical dance style of Bharatanatyam by her mother, Mangalam Iyer, a student of the famed Ram Gopal, among the first to showcase Indian classical dance in the West in the 1930s and known as “the Nijinsky of India”. Following her Arangetram (debut on-stage performance), Sitakumari performed widely across the UK and Europe as a classical dancer and then in her own contemporary style in which she still performs and teaches.
Together with writer and photographer Nick Sidle, she set up Natya Padam in the 1980’s funded by the Arts Council of Great Britain, an innovative company to produce performances and workshops.
This became Heartstone in 1990 with the publishing of the book ‘The Heartstone Odyssey’ by the company she helped to found, Allied Mouse Limited.
Her passion is to use the storytelling medium of dance, and in particular the mudra language of Indian Classical Dance, to bring people together across all nationalities, races, cultures and backgrounds and tell the stories that people may not have heard or will not have heard well. She has set up a network of contacts across the world with people who bring stories to her for this purpose. The most important story in her portfolio is ‘The Heartstone Odyssey’, and her aim is to give life to the character, Chandra, the heroine of the story.
Sitakumari is responsible for organising all Heartstone photo assignments, producing exhibition and performance events, setting up and running projects throughout the UK using Heartstone stories. Events have been staged at some of the UK’s most prestigious locations including London’s South Bank. She is currently involved in a major collaborative project with Barrie Osborne, producer of the Lord of the Rings trilogy to help take ‘The Heartstone Odyssey’ to the big screen.