PRABHA RUSTAGI MEMORIAL TRUST (PRMT)

After Prabha left us, a non-profit corporation, Prabha Rustagi Memorial Trust (PRMT), was formed in the State of Washington in August of 1996 by Surender Bhatia, Niranjan and Shantha Benegal, and others. This allowed us to bring Prabha’s teacher, Urmila Nagar, to the US to work as a teacher and performer. Each year PRMT invited Urmila-ji to come for several months to teach and to create and present an annual student concert. When Covid made travel impossible Zoom meetings were used for teaching. Urmila-ji, while in India, created several pieces with sound tracks to accompany them for our annual student concert in ’21. In ’22, still not able to get her artists’ visa, Didi  taught compositions from which we created our student concert.    

Our mission is to keep a vital Kathak Dance presence in the NW. In addition to Didi’s teaching, regular practice and our yearly concert, we accept invitations to perform, give lecture/demonstrations, teach in school classrooms, perform in cultural events like Children’s International Friendship Festival, Folklife, Cultural Crossroads, Anandamela, founding of City Office of Arts & Culture events, libraries, Senior Centers.

Working with local teachers of tabla drums and Indian music on traditional and non-traditional instruments we are training students to accompany our Kathak dancers.

We have created this website to inform about Kathak Dance, our history and have included links to films of past presentations both by Didi and her students, pictures and Zoom lessons taught during Covid.