Rooted in the Indian traditions of Kathak and Mallakhamb and interwoven with contemporary dance-theatre, 'KiN'—an Isha Sharvani and Daksha Sheth Dance Company production, presented in Delhi by the Natya Ballet Centre with the support of the Australian High Commission and the Government of Western Australia, explores how art transforms across generations—what is passed on, what is reinvented, and what remains constant. Performed by three generations of the Daksha Sheth Dance Company, it is a lived family story unfolding in front of an audience.
At its heart, KiN is not merely a performance but an intimate act of remembering—of a family tracing its artistic lineage across continents, traditions and generations. To watch them perform together, in a work rooted in their own lives, is to be invited into a living archive -- a home where art was not practice but a way of growing up, where movement was a language that existed long before words could.
Daksha: A childhood of unending curiosity
For Daksha Sheth, that language began at nine. She remembers those early years with clarity: how she made “classical dance for theatre” her specialty at an age when most children are still fumbling with school routines. Her hunger for training was insatiable—Garba and Kathak, Chhau and Kalaripayattu, and later, the aerial rope tradition that would eventually anchor her company’s signature. “Everything was dance,” she said, recounting how, even as a child, she moved from one form to the next with the curiosity of someone who understood instinctively that each discipline opened a new door. It was a way of life she never had to consciously pass on—her children absorbed it simply by being around it.
Isha: Growing up in green rooms
Her daughter Isha Sharvani , grew up not in classrooms but in theatres across the world. She recalls a childhood shaped by rehearsals, backstage chatter, and watching her parents transform spaces with choreography and light. She never had to be persuaded into dance. In fact, she once wanted to leave school entirely. Her first major show, however, shook her confidence—until she saw her mother. “She reached me and, seeing her, I became confident. I said thank God you’re here.” The comfort of lineage became its own kind of grounding.
Dev and Tao: Music, cricket & a sense of belonging
Her father, Dev Issaro, himself an artiste trained in Hindustani classical music and in the Bansuri and Pakhawaj, remembers the early days with the same vividness. Of little Isha climbing into his lap while he was playing the Pakhawaj, and Tao’s taking interest in the company slowly, eventually finding his niche in music. Dev says, “music became his (Tao’s) very honest place.”
But Tao’s entry into the arts was never a straight line. He was “sports-driven”, especially cricket. “I felt if I don’t join I’ll be left behind because everybody was part of the company.” That fear of missing out pulled him into rehearsals long before passion did. Eventually, he took to drums. He learned patiently, with a passion even. “This was something I could understand, connect with,” he says, describing how he would shut himself up in his room practicing incessantly for long hours. Later, everything seemed to fall into place: the instincts, the discipline, the rhythm he wouldn’t have recognised in himself earlier. “She’s still my teacher,” he said quietly of Daksha, noting how even now she continues to explore and train, never done with learning.
Isha and Russell: A second Australian thread
Isha’s partnership with Russell Thorpe adds another layer to the family’s interwoven history of movement, travel and serendipity. They first crossed paths in Australia, when Russell and Tao happened to be working on a project together. It also created an unexpected symmetry within the family: just as Dev had once come to India from Australia and become part of Daksha’s artistic world, Russell—Australian himself—found his way into Isha’s life and, eventually, into the family’s creative universe. The Australian link, carried across two generations, now feels less like coincidence and more like a recurring thread in the family’s story, considering how 'KiN' was born in the soils of Australia.
Luca: The next link in the chain
This same quiet continuity plays out in the youngest member of 'KiN', Luca—Tao’s nephew and Daksha’s grandson—who performs with a sort of wonder that only a child can sustain. He said he was especially thrilled about getting to miss school. Watching him look up at his mother with awe during rehearsals, it’s easy to see the same instinctive absorption that once pulled Isha into her parents’ world.
A production about Inheritance
Involving three generations, 'KiN' becomes less of a dance production and more of a map of inheritance—the kind that is passed on not by instruction but by proximity. Their stories reveal a family that never separated life from art. Even the lines spoken in the performance—“I feel myself becoming a dream again,” “my time has come, again”—echo sentiments that surfaced during conversations: that art, for them, is a way of returning to the self, of revisiting earlier versions of who they were and who they hoped to become. The performance encompasses all sorts of emotions—love, loss, grief, innocence—everything that pulls the audience closer to the concept of family.
The performance’s framing, too, mirrors their lived history. It opens with Isha suspended in yogic stillness on the rope; it ends with the same image, completing a circle that is not theatrical but deeply personal: a mother’s vision carried forward by the daughter who grew up learning to breathe onstage. When Isha and Daksha perform together, what emerges is not simply technique—though there is plenty of it—but a kind of familial memory. A mother who once trained across multiple traditions. A daughter who felt safer under her mother’s gaze. A son who thought cricket would define him until rhythm caught him unexpectedly. A grandson who joins because family is simply something you follow.
'KiN' honours all of this. Not through spectacle, but through the small truths the family carries: the laughter, the confessions, the journeys that began reluctantly, instinctively, or joyfully. It is a reminder that art, when lived together, becomes a form of kinship in itself—a quiet, ongoing inheritance that needs no explanation at all.