An all-girls ensemble that works on multiple genres of dance

They performed the song Mahishmathi (from Baahubali) from the soldiers’ point of view. Archana Raja, the producer and a senior Bharatanatyam artiste in the team says, “One fine Sunday we all got together for a Bollywood jam session organised by Ishwarya Balabharthy. We haven’t danced in a while and just wanted to meet each other and dance together. It was a crazy one-hour session and was amazing to relive our moments of dancing together. At that time, I popped up a question whether we could form a team and post videos on social media. Ishwarya, the choreographer immediately agreed to it. So we shot this Hindi remix song — Breakup song which went super viral that we decided to launch our team. We named Tip Tap Toe and officially made it our team.”

They did the first video — Breakup song purely for fun. However, the response they got for the video encouraged them to do the second video — Maahishmathi. “The Breakup song was an unexpected hit on social media. That motivated us to do the second video. Ishwarya, our choreographer, has always been a very tasteful person and it so happens that when she listens to some songs, it naturally hits her it could be danced for and it would definitely create an impact. That’s how the Baahubali song was chosen by her. It was three months of day and night practice and planning to get this going. Doing things from scratch wasn’t easy. Forming a team and maintaining peace wasn’t easy at all — but the love for dance alone kept us going,” she explains.

The song was dedicated to women in the armed forces. “We are an all-girls ensemble. We stand up for successful, multitasking women (us managing professional jobs too), for their empowerment and through dance and for this song we thought it was apt to honour women and we couldn’t think of anything better than those serve as army forces fighting for our country (one of the fields were women contribution is underrated).”

TTT is a place for aspiring dancers of any genre to experiment and work on creative ideas. “We are all trained Bharatanatyam dancers for more than a decade. Ishwarya has a very good wavelength with all of us. I think that’s how we were able to bring whatever she visualised it like. She’s a taskmaster and always brings the best out of us.”

The core team consists of six people: Ishwarya Balabharthy, Varsha Balabharthy, Archana Raja, Shri Varsha, Vidyalakshmi and Varsha Jayalakshmi. “The other members are Simran Sivakumar, Sandhya Mohan, Namrata and Gayatri Badri who are trained dancers for many years. Ocassionaly, they work with dancers like Shobana,” she sums up.