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By Harry Coen
Sunday Express, May 23, 1999
The curtain is about to rise at Sadler's Wells. London's keenest dance afficionados shift expectantly in their seats. Rambert Dance Company, Britain's oldest and arguably finest ballet troupe, is about to launch into Cruel Garden, evoking the life and painful times of Spain's great playwright Federico Garcia Lorca.
It is one of the most challenging, passionate and difficult works of the past 20 years, choreographed by Christopher Bruce and Lindsay Kemp to music by Carlos Miranda. These performances are the last we shall see of this work for the foreseeable future. Expectations are high............
Enter WPC Norika Datta, nine-year veteran of Sun Hill Nick and ITV's popular cop show, The Bill. She's singing. And, as she swirls around swishing voluminous skirts with her Spanish-combed,elaborately coiffed head held impossibly high, could that be flamenco she's breaking into - and expertly too?
Well, yes. She dominates the stage, her strong, wide-ranging voice projecting powerfully beyond the footlights. She must set the scene, draw us in - and from time to time shift the perspective of this great tragedy about the grief of the Spanish Civil War. The role demands a high order of voice, presence and projection.
Who'd have thought it? Even actress Seeta Indrani, who created meek-though-steely little Datta, the Asian policewoman in The Bill, cannot quite believe she has made the transition from trudging the beat to treading the hallowed boards of Sadler's Wells.
"It's the furthest I could possibly have got from The Bill," says Seeta, who practices her passion for flamenco daily. "She's so BIG," she says of her role, proprietor of El Cafe de Chinitas. "Television is all nuance for the camera: a little tear rolling down an otherwise expressionless face. But this is different. It's very over the top and I'm not used to that. When we performed it in Turin I found myself in a 1,800-seater, a huge theatre with an orchestra pit so large that the first row of the audience was 50 feet away, so there was no room for subtlety, only power."
She's in Cruel Garden as an actress and singer, not a dancer, but as she sings to the company of dancers, what's more natural than that she should burst into a few flamenco steps? She acknowledges that while working with so famous a dance company it was a bit daring, but she couldn't resist it. She's still a little disbelieving that they are letting her do it. Flamenco is a passion and she owes her considerable expertise in it to The Bill. Unlike so many other television series which jealously keep a stranglehold on their players, it actively encourages actors to take other work - one reason she stayed so long.
She originally trained as a dancer (London School of Contemporary Dance and as a long spell as the Siamese cat in CATS). When the Paco Pena company came to London and offered flamenco classes she was hooked - so much so that The Bill allowed her three months in Spain to follow her new-found enthusiasm. "I'll always thank The Bill for that," she says. She has become an acknowledged teacher and choreographer. The obsession has helped extend her range as an actress in her mid-30s.
After Cruel Garden, it's back to her post-Bill career, recording a Christmas CD with Chris Tarrant for a children's charity, preparing for a play at the Riverside Studios and deciding which pantomime to go for this year, plus maybe a trip to Australia where her fame from The Bill has gone before her.
There's one other intriguing possibility. She's the proud possessor of two awards from The Asian Film Academy for The Bill. How about an Asian musical? She bursts into delighted laughter - "I'd love to do that - those films are just crazy, totally mad." After Sadler's Wells does Bollywood beckon?
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