When the lights finally go down over the theatre and the anxious murmurs of parents fade out, the dancers line up behind the microphone.

One by one they approach it and offer a verse, both in words and corresponding mudras -- delicate, precise hand movements -- of the Hindu myth of the Lord of the Dance, and then take their place on the stage. The gold trim of their green, red and blue saris shimmers elegantly as they stand erect, waiting to begin.

These girls have just begun a performance of Bharatnatyam, one of India's oldest and most popular classical dance forms, in the style of the legendary T Balasaraswati.

But what makes this scene so unusual is that it is taking place not in Madras, where the dance was born and thrives today. It is being performed at the Julia Morgan Theatre in Oakland, California.

And the young dancers are not Indian. Most are not even of Indian descent. These are American children of all stripes -- white, black, brown -- who make up the diverse population of Oakland's Park Day School.

For nearly 17 years, Aggie Brenneman, a handsome, dark-haired American woman now in her fifties, has taught the songs, movements and poetry of this ancient South Indian Tanjore court dance to the school's students. Trained in ballet and tap dancing, Brenneman fell in love with Bharatnatyam when she first saw it performed on a trip to India in the late 1960s with her husband, then the assistant director of the Peace Corps in India.

"It blew me away with the rhythm of tap, the beautiful movement of ballet, and then it had drama," she recalls. She and her husband were living in Jaipur at the time, so when a teacher from Madras, R Natwar, came to town, she convinced him to let her join his classes.

"All of the other students were 12-year-olds, and I was 25," she says. "He allowed me to work in the back of the classroom." She continued to work intensively with him for the next couple of years, learning the Kalakshetra style and preparing for her arangetram, or solo coming out recital.

When she returned to the United States in 1972 after four years, she and her husband, who has since passed away, settled in Berkeley. That summer, one of India's most highly acclaimed dancers, T Balasaraswati, was teaching nearby at the Centre for World Music -- what is now the Julia Morgan Centre.

Brenneman began working with her there, essentially starting over in the new style. For the next two summers, when Balasaraswati came to the United States to teach around the country as part of the American Dance Festival, Brenneman would join her. And in later years, while she and her husband were stationed in Nepal and Malaysia, Brenneman worked with Balasaraswati at her home in Madras.

Since the great dancer died in 1984, Brenneman has begun working with her daughter, Lakshmi S Knight, who lives in Middletown, Connecticut, with her American husband.

When she started teaching Bharatnayam at Park Day School, a private, progressive elementary and middle school where she had been hired as a sixth grade teacher, Brenneman had no idea how popular the dance would become with the students there.

The classes started with a handful of students whose interest had been piqued by a performance she gave for Diwali. Today, 16 years later, she has 55 dance students, or nearly a quarter of the school's population.

"The little ones really take to it," says Brenneman. "They love the rhythm and repetition and the stories." But it isn't just the little ones. Many start in the first grade and continue even after they have long left the school.

At 17, petite, blonde Josie Shields-Stromsness is the school's most advanced dancer, and also now a teaching assistant. She has been practising for 11 years and plans to continue when she goes to Brown University next year. If, that is, she can find a teacher.

Josie is one of a handful of older girls who have invested in real saris. Brenneman specially orders them through a friend who travels to India every year. For the rest, she hand-makes half-saris by sewing Indian trim on to brightly coloured silk. She and the children also sewed together fresh carnations to garnish their hair for this night's performance.

"They love to do it," she says. "It is an important part of the ritual."

Some of the children have been inspired by the dances to learn more about Indian culture. Thirteen-year-old Petra Valoma is fascinated by the myths. For a class last year she did a report on Ramala, one of the stories the dancers acted out on this occasion. But many of the students are more interested in the bangles, the iridescent saris, and the stick-on bindis than the traditions that spawned them.

"There is a cultural barrier there," says Fernando Jimenez Armenta, father of 14-year-old dancer Carmen Jimenez-Robbins. "They don't want to get in too deep. They don't know what they celebrate, what part of the year to celebrate it, even the geography."

Multicultural education is part of the Park Day School's philosophy, and many of the parents see the dance as a facet of that. One parent, Harvey Hyman, says he thinks the dance will help teach his seven-year-old daughter Simone about different groups and cultures so that she will grow up more tolerant. But very few take the dancing seriously enough to consider anything more than the once per week classes that Brenneman offers.

Although there are several Bharatnatyam institutes in the Bay Area, most of their students come from the large Indian community here. Even at the professional level, Bharatnayam performances in the United States have by and large been relegated to "ethnic dance" status, and rarely reach mainstream audiences.

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