In 1986-87, she was the chief choreographer for the opening events of the Festival of India’s inauguration in the then USSR, for which she worked with 800 Indian dancers and musicians representing 35 folk, tribal and classical dance forms.
Though she was much above awards, for the sake of statistics one could list some of the major awards bestowed upon her: the Sangeet Natak Academy award and Kalidas Samman.
The catalogue for the 'Next Wave' festival in 1998 said, ‘Like another epochal dancer-choreographer, Isadora Duncan, to whom she is often compared, Chandralekha takes both physical and spiritual energy as her subjects, and shows them as ultimately indissoluble.’
Her quest was, 'Where does the body begin and end?'
If, as she believed, life is circular and if her mind was set free from her body, perhaps she must have been thinking the same when her mortal body was consigned to flames on Sunday evening.
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