MEDFORD - A jazz soprano saxophone riff moaned and echoed, started and stopped, inside the otherwise dark and quiet hallways at Springstep studios last Sunday afternoon. The music, mellow and smooth, was accompanied by the rapid clap of bare feet slapping hard and fast against the wood floor. Bells shimmied and rattled. It was an unlikely but captivating orchestra.
Inside a rehearsal hall, Gretchen Hayden, a blue-eyed blonde draped in colorful Indian clothes, was gesturing, swirling, and pounding her feet - with such force she had to readjust a hairpin - as she transformed her body into a percussive instrument. Weighted brass bells clasped her ankles.
Hayden, daughter of the Hollywood star Sterling Hayden, is living out her passion as a trained dancer and teacher of Kathak, a classical Indian dance form. Born into a glamorous and eccentric life in Los Angeles, she has discovered her own path. At 57, a senior disciple of the renowned dancer Chitresh Das, she has performed around the world and has two local concerts coming up: one tonight, an East-meets-West fusion performance with the world-jazz ensemble Natraj, and one on Dec. 15. Hayden is also the artistic director of Chhandika, a Boston-based nonprofit Kathak organization, and teaches Kathak at Tufts University and Wellesley College.
In her very choice of profession, this white, Western woman is defying convention by teaching mostly South Asian women the importance of keeping their own culture alive - something that hasn't always been met with open hearts and minds.
But it was her extraordinary childhood, an adventure-filled youth with a father who essentially kidnapped her and her siblings in 1959, that thrust a much younger Hayden into the public eye.
She was 9 years old when Sterling Hayden - whose career would encompass starring roles in "Johnny Guitar," "The Asphalt Jungle," "Dr. Strangelove," "The Long Goodbye," and "The Godfather" - defied court orders to whisk her and her three brothers off on a 10-month journey to Tahiti aboard his schooner, Wanderer.
The iconoclastic, sea-loving star had emerged victorious from a bitter custody battle but was forbidden from taking the children out of the country. Headlines screamed as he turned his back on the courts and Hollywood. Meanwhile his ex-wife, model Betty deNoon Hayden, was beside herself, angrily filing lawsuits and petitioning for her kids' safe return.
It was an ugly period in the family's public life. But aboard the boat with her dad, the experience was nothing short of amazing.
"We were miles and miles away from land," she said during a recent interview, recalling life with a tutor and a chef onboard the 93-foot boat, and the experience of swimming in the vast sea. "Feeling the ocean underneath your little feet. . . . It was dazzling."
Today her mother lives in California, and her siblings are doing well, she said. "We love each other," she said, adding that she is very protective of her mother.
She smiled while reflecting on her youth with her ruggedly handsome father, a former Marine born in Maine who, throughout his life, used the sea as an escape from routine, domesticity, and stardom. Sterling Hayden's adventures - a gun runner and undercover intelligence agent for America during World War II, a brief but storied flirtation with Communism - and his devotion to his children were legendary. But he was a complicated man who became an alcoholic before he died of cancer in 1986.
"We had an interesting and adventurous, complex childhood. . . . I adored my father," Hayden said, smiling as she scanned old photos of her family, some aboard the Wanderer. "I have a big picture of him hanging up at home."
She became a kind of wanderer herself. At 16 in 1967, she was arrested with four other teens at a marijuana party. The charges were soon dismissed.
Though she didn't exactly have a plan for her future, she said, she charted her own journey. "I didn't go on to college," she confessed. "I was exploring different paths. I had dreamy ideas." In the late 1960s and early '70s, she lived in San Francisco in a rustic Pullman train car her father had bought years before. "I lived on boats before," she said, laughing. "I was used to very compact spaces."
A Beatles fan, she went to peace marches and was involved in the spirit of the times. She was trying to find herself.
It happened when she and a group of her friends visited an Indian dance class taught by Das, a master of Kathak dance. She knew nothing of India or its traditions. But when the dancers came out, "I was mesmerized," she recalled. "It was very exhilarating. At the time we were studying with these great masters, we just didn't know it."
While her friends didn't stick with it, a light bulb went on. Through the storytelling, the rapid footwork, the discipline and philosophy, she was hooked.
Even then, there was a culture clash. Her teacher was perplexed. "How do you instill such a classical tradition in a group of . . . 'hippies?' Oh, I hate that word," Hayden said, laughing. But, yes, she and her friends wore halter tops, sometimes no bras, and for Indians, she said, "this is not how you come to dance class." Class was about discipline and respect.
"There is a very serious side to this expression," she explained, adding that soon she dedicated her life to studying and dancing Kathak, taking on odd jobs such as working at a gas station to make ends meet. Her family didn't exactly understand what she was doing or why she was doing it. "I think they were mystified, but they didn't have any judgments," she said. "I think, to this day, they don't know why this resonated with me. But they're delighted."
Since then Hayden has given solo recitals and workshops in the United States, Canada, Germany, Holland, Switzerland, and India. While in Calcutta for an extended stay in 1987, she received a senior degree in Kathak dance from the Nritya Bharati Academy.
It was 1992 when she moved to Boston with her husband of now 37 years, George Ruckert, a sarodist and musicologist who teaches at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. But moving here didn't make for an easy transition for Hayden. There was no Kathak community. She had to establish her own.
"I was very much floundering," she recalled. "We didn't know people in the area. I felt like I was out of my cocoon. My husband had his job, but I was lost."
She didn't have an academic degree or training running a school, and she was a bit shy. But she managed to rent studio space and start giving classes at the Dance Complex in Cambridge.
Once again, she focused on her art full time. A group of Tufts students who took her class became enthusiastic about bringing Hayden and Kathak to the campus. It didn't take long for a buzz to start, and when a part-time dance instructor position opened up, Hayden fit right in. She also teaches at Wellesley. And she founded Chhandika (Chandam Institute of Kathak Dance), turning it, with students' help, into a nonprofit that teaches Kathak to people age 5 to 60. (All told, she has over 80 students.) Chhandika's aim, she said, is to become an outreach organization extending the healthful and meditative benefits of Kathak to a broader community.
Even with such worthy goals, she has met some resistance from skeptics who were sure, at first, she could not teach Indian dance with authenticity or authority.
Anjali Mitter Duva, 34, said she was interested in taking Kathak classes in 2001 because she was looking for an activity that had a similar discipline to her martial-arts training.
"I remember having this conversation with my husband: 'The person teaching, her name is Gretchen Hayden. This is supposed to be an Indian thing,' " said Duva, who is half Indian, half Caucasian. "My husband, who teaches martial arts, was like, 'Excuse me? You studied a Korean form of martial arts with me. Am I Korean?' "
As it turned out, most of Duva's fellow students were South Asian. "I figured if they don't have a problem with it, why should I?" said Duva. "I immediately felt comfortable with the way she was teaching, the general warmth of her style. She was an excellent practitioner. That was six years ago, and I sort of got hooked." Duva is now executive director of Chhandika.
Not everyone was so open-minded, Hayden said. Some parents in the Indian community rejected her from the outset.
"I remember being terribly hurt," Hayden said. "Some of the mothers didn't want their daughters studying with a Westerner. I realized it's not the same." But she also realized that for her students, "growing up in the US, seeing their culture and tradition reflected through my eyes. . ., with me, they see it in a new light."
Hayden hopes that her organization will one day become an integral part of the area's arts landscape. In the meantime, she's perfectly content with living a life filled with eager students and the sounds of feet pounding the floors, bells, and breathless storytelling.
"We have a Boston Ballet," she says. "Why not Cambridge Kathak?"
