In her Sunnyvale garage-turned-dance studio, Nitya Narasimhan leaned into her music player, sending a cascade of Indian music bounding through the room’s speakers and across the polished wood floors — and began dancing.

It’s a passion that Narasimhan has nurtured since she was four years old growing up in Bangaluru and Chennai in Southern India. Her family moved often, but the dancing — a classical form of South Asian dance called bharatanatyam — always followed.

“Everywhere I went my parents had like two duties,” Narasimhan laughed, “one was to find me a new school and they had to find me a new dance class.”

The bharatanatyam dance is a cantata of jumps and leaps, fast movements with percussive foot stomps — emotion is conveyed with facial expressions, all on display as Narasimhan prac

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