An Empty Cup: Dinesh Digal on Learning, Unlearning and Dance
"As a male belly dancer, I was insecure about entering a team of all women performers."
When Dinesh Digal first joined Nrityakosh, he wasn't sure what to expect. He had spent years training across multiple dance forms and had come to Bangalore with a very specific goal: to train intensively in belly dance under Nrityakosh founder and company director Debapriya Das.
He moved to Bangalore in 2022 with an initial plan to stay for just three months.
It didn't quite work out that way.
"Nrityakosh welcomed me with open arms. What matters here is my dancing skills and the effort I put - there was no other criteria. Within those three months, I could see my growth, not just as a dancer, but as part of a community and as part of the school as well."
Dinesh soon decided to make Bangalore his permanent home. Within a few months of joining Nrityakosh, he was inducted into the Nrityakosh Company as a dancer. By 2023, he had joined the faculty.
"Nrityakosh gave me opportunities I was looking for without me asking for it. It became a natural part of my dancing journey."
Today, Dinesh teaches and performs in Bangalore. He has extensively trained in Middle Eastern classical and traditional dance styles, alongside Odissi, jazz, ballet and contemporary dance. He also performs as a drag artiste in Bangalore. However, his journey towards becoming a professional dancer was anything but straightforward.
A dancer before he knew he was one
For Dinesh, dance began long before he had imagined making a career out of it.
He grew up in an environment where dance was an integral part of community celebrations. Watching people around him dance and keep their cultural lineage alive became an early source of inspiration.
"Dance was an integral part of celebrations of the vibrant tribe I grew up with. I was motivated to dance by watching the people around me keep the lineage of culture alive by dancing."
As a young boy, Dinesh would dance alone in his room, imagining himself as a performer like the ones he had watched around him.
As a teenager, he pursued dance alongside his education. Odissi became his first formal dance training, but at the time, he thought of dance as a hobby rather than a possible career. That changed years later. Dinesh was working as a researcher in a wildlife sanctuary when circumstances prevented him from training regularly.
"I didn't realise it was a calling—until I was put in a position where I could not train regularly. I was working as a researcher in a wildlife sanctuary when I realised that I could not live without dance."
That realisation forced him to reconsider the direction of his life. He quit his job and moved to Delhi to pursue dance training.
"I worked many odd jobs, such as working in call centres, so that I could spend four to five hours in a dance class to give myself the training I needed to be a professional dancer."
For about five years, he trained intensively in multiple disciplines, including belly dance, jazz, ballet, and contemporary dance. He continued this multidisciplinary training until he felt ready to take on the demands of professional dance.
What jazz and ballet taught him about music
Although Odissi was his first formal dance training, Dinesh credits his jazz and ballet training with fundamentally changing his understanding of musicality. In those classes, movement wasn't something that happened alongside music. Movement was inseparable from it.
“In jazz and ballet, if you raise your arms, that also has to go with the music. You cannot just raise your arm without any music or just count.”
Even something as small as turning your head, raising your arm or breathing in and out could have a relationship with the music. That understanding has become central to the way Dinesh teaches.
“In a dance class, the warm-up should be a dance, not a warm-up.”
This is why Dinesh's beginner classes may often begin with music that has nothing to do with belly dance. He might play pop, country, contemporary, folk or Indian music alongside Arabic music. The purpose is to teach students something fundamental before introducing them to the vocabulary of belly dance: how to move with music. “The first thing that my students will learn as a beginner student is to move with the music, be it any kind of music.”
His warm-ups therefore aren't simply a series of physical exercises. Each movement has a relationship with the music. This is to help students begin developing a sense of rhythm and musical response, which helps later on when introducing Arabic music and the specific rhythms and qualities of Middle Eastern dance.
Learning from many dance forms
Dinesh sees cross-training as one of the most valuable parts of being a dancer. Each style has given him something different.
His Odissi training taught him discipline, repetition, body conditioning, projection and facial expression. He describes the form as having a distinctive combination of fluidity and sculptural poses.
Jazz taught him energy, musicality and projection. “Jazz has a lot of sex appeal, a lot of feel to the music, a lot of energy projection towards the audience.”
Ballet taught him precision, repetition and an extremely detailed relationship with music and movement. He also sees interesting connections between ballet and Odissi: both demand repetition and sustained practice. “You just repeat one thing for one year, six months or whatever. That is the most similar thing that I have found in the classical domain.”
But cross-training also comes with a challenge: what you have learnt in one style inevitably follows you into another.
An Odissi arm may appear when learning Kathak. A familiar posture may surface in a completely different movement vocabulary. For Dinesh, learning a new style therefore requires a willingness to unlearn. “You have to believe that you are a beginner in whatever new class you are going to. A lot of times we have to unlearn a lot of things.”
He approaches a new style with what he describes as an “empty cup” - not because previous training is irrelevant, but because comparing every new teacher or movement to what he already knows can prevent him from truly understanding it. Observation is an important part of this process.
During periods when he was training in several styles simultaneously, Dinesh would spend time watching videos of ballet, jazz and Odissi, studying the body language, nuances and movement qualities of each. “After classroom learning, the first thing that will help you build that kind of vocabulary is observation.”
Middle Eastern dance itself encompasses an enormous range of musical and emotional qualities - from devotion and tenderness to sensuality, exuberance and strength. Dinesh's cross-training gives him multiple ways of approaching these qualities. "There are constraints now in pursuing some of these dance styles—financial and time—but Debapriya makes sure that any of her advanced dancers do not miss out on the training benefits we get from classical or contemporary dances. My body is still connected to the training I have had."
The Empty Cup Philosophy As a Teacher
This empty philosophy is especially evident in the way Dinesh teaches beginners. “Whenever I start a new batch, I always tell my students that because it's a beginners' batch, I'm specifically not a belly dance teacher to them.”
That begins from the very first warm-up he facilitates, where they can learn to listen to music, recognise a count and allow their body to respond. For Dinesh, that is the beginning of becoming a dancer.
He works with students from very different backgrounds. Some have never danced before. Others have extensive training in another style but are completely new to belly dance. He believes both kinds of students benefit from approaching the class with openness. “I always hope students come with an empty cup.”
He doesn't mean that students should forget everything they have learnt. Rather, he encourages them to temporarily put aside comparison and give themselves the opportunity to understand a new teacher and movement system on its own terms. “When you come to a new teacher, the approach is different. A lot of things are different.”
Dinesh experienced this conflict himself when moving between dance forms. Over time, he learnt that trusting the learning process made it easier to accept a different methodology and actually absorb what was being taught. “When you kind of give that trust to your teacher, the process becomes a little easier.”
For him, being open-minded isn't about blindly accepting everything a teacher says. It is about allowing yourself to become a beginner again. That is something he continues to practise himself.
“Just show up”: Being a male belly dancer
When Dinesh first entered the belly dance world, he had a very real concern: he was a man entering a predominantly female performance space.
Today, he regularly hears similar concerns from men who message him about joining belly dance classes.
"I'm a man. I want to learn belly dancing. How can I join? Will it be weird? Are there other men?"
Dinesh understands the hesitation because he experienced it himself. “For a man to think like that, that kind of under-confidence is very normal. It's very natural. Even I had that.”
However, his experience eventually changed his perspective. When he first contacted a teacher, he specifically mentioned that he was a man. The teacher simply responded positively and invited him to join.
At the time, he found it strange that the teacher didn't make much of the fact that he was a man. Today, he understands why.
“A teacher is a teacher. A teacher will teach you dance irrespective of your gender or whatever.”
His advice to anyone nervous about entering a dance class is simple: Just go once.
“Once you give it a try, the rest will follow.”
He sees a parallel with his own journey into drag. The hardest part was taking the first step. Once he showed up, opportunities and people followed. The same thing can happen in a dance classroom.
A classroom where everyone becomes a learner
One of the things Dinesh values most about dance is its ability to create a space where the identities people carry outside the studio become less important.
Over the years, he has taught and trained alongside people of different ages, genders, sexualities, social backgrounds and economic circumstances. Inside the classroom, those differences don't determine who gets to learn.
“Once you go to a class, the thin lines between gender, social hierarchy, economic hierarchy- everything kind of dissolves.”
What remains is a group of people learning together. “It becomes a sort of community.”
For Dinesh, this is one of the most powerful things about an artistic space: a classroom can become neutral ground where everyone is simultaneously a learner. And that is why he believes the first step is simply showing up.
“Don't think much. Just show up in a class and then leave the rest up to your teacher.”
From belly dancer to drag artiste
Dinesh's performance practice extends beyond belly dance. He also performs as a drag artiste across the country.
He first encountered drag through RuPaul's Drag Race, but the idea of men performing femininity wasn't entirely unfamiliar to him. Growing up, he had seen men perform as women in cultural and traditional performance contexts. It took him several years, however, to actually try drag himself.
“I thought of doing drag maybe for a good three years.”
Eventually, a competition gave him the push he needed. He created his costume, worked on his padding and makeup, and entered the show. He didn't win. But people noticed his performance, and soon he began receiving bookings for drag shows.
What he discovered through drag was much more profound than another performance style. It became a way of exploring femininity and, ultimately, himself.
Before drag, Dinesh had often expressed feminine energy through his dancing. It came naturally to him, but he felt something was missing. “There was something missing. I don't know what that thing was.”
Drag gave him the opportunity to embody that femininity completely—to transform his silhouette, exaggerate his hair and makeup, and create an entire persona, an alter ego. “When I got into drag and saw that in the mirror, that was the first time I felt like, okay, this is the epitome of the femininity that I can project.”
He describes the experience as a form of self-validation. He can step into that persona, inhabit it completely on stage, and return to his everyday life.
What drag taught him about performance
Dinesh initially assumed that his experience as a dancer would make the transition into drag relatively straightforward. Instead, drag taught him something he hadn't consciously considered before: main character energy. “One ground-breaking rule of drag is - you are the main character.”
Drag taught Dinesh a different kind of performance presence. “You are the singer who is singing the music. You are the dancer who is dancing to the music. You are doing a live show in front of whatever set of crowd.”
Even when he isn't literally singing, he tries to embody the feeling that he is the singer.
That mindset has travelled back into his work as a dancer. He believes dancers can sometimes forget their own presence when performing as part of a group. “It's like a pop star dancing in front of thousands of people.”
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