R
aksha Parsnani was sixteen when Shakira’s Hips Don’t Lie came out and she could not look away. She had no idea that one music video would eventually take her from a shy schoolgirl in Mumbai to performing at Luna Park in Melbourne, in one of the city’s most celebrated variety shows, wearing costumes ordered directly from Egypt.
The journey took twenty years, and began with a belly dance class in Mumbai, where there were only two teachers at the time. For a shy teenager who struggled to speak to people, dance gave her something unexpected: confidence.
“It was more than just a dance form for me personally,” she says. “When I started belly dancing, it gave me a lot of confidence. The mind-body connection is exceptional in belly dance. You start feeling like you own your body, you own your mind, everything.”
She studied under Preeti Kocher, a belly dance teacher who is also, as Raksha mentions with some delight, a dentist. She then spent six years learning, travelling internationally to workshops, training with multiple teachers and slowly building the technique that belly dance demands. The movements have to slowly settle into muscle memory, and that takes time.
“I’d compare it to ballet or Indian classical dance forms,” she says. “To do authentic Egyptian-style belly dancing, you need to train with multiple teachers.”
She also had a degree in software engineering and spent two years working in tech. Then in 2012 her father passed away. She left her job to be with her mother and support her younger sister through her studies. The same week she left, she got a call from Melvin Louis, one of Mumbai’s best known dancers, who had just opened three new studios and needed teachers. She had no teaching experience. She said yes anyway.
Within three years it was her full-time work, earning three times what software engineering had paid her. She organised one of the biggest belly dance festivals in India, called Arabella. She taught Bollywood actress Jacqueline Fernandez for more than three months. She was, by any measure, at the peak of her career.
Then her then-boyfriend, now husband, got a job in Australia in cyber security and they decided to move. She arrived in Melbourne ten years ago and spent the first year watching, networking and figuring out how things worked. She went to coding workshops, dance workshops and marketing seminars. She started a Bollywood dance company called Rhythmic Feet Dance Academy, then realised Bollywood was not where her heart was. She parked that and went back to belly dance, starting to teach at Studio J in Richmond, a studio with strong connections to the Indian community.
It was at Studio J that everything changed again. A fellow teacher, Govind Pillai, saw her perform and recommended her to Moira Finucane, the artistic director of Finucane and Smith, one of Melbourne’s most internationally recognised variety performance companies. Moira called, they met, and four years later Raksha has performed in three Finucane and Smith productions — Future Joy Club, House of the Heart at the Chinese Museum, and now Dance Palace at Luna Park.
Dance Palace is playing at Luna Park’s Luna Palace until 12 September, celebrating thirty years of Finucane and Smith with a festival that includes burlesque, circus, live music, cabaret and belly dance. Raksha has two acts in the show.
The first is called Queen of the Krill, created in response to Moira’s PhD research on art and extinction, which focuses in part on sea creatures called krill. Raksha choreographed a belly dance piece to the Gladiator song Now We Are Free, showing how a krill moves through water. It is not the kind of brief most dancers receive. She took it and made something that reviewers have called mesmerising.
Her second act is an authentic Egyptian classical belly dance performed to Arabic music, using two props — Isis Wings, worn by the goddess Isis, and a cane. She moves through the audience, up onto the main stage and across to a raised island between the crowd. The costumes were ordered from Egypt. The technique is the real thing.
The reviews have reflected that. Scenestr called her a belly dance enchantress who brings serious star power to the stage. Standing Innovation wrote that she bursts onto the stage in a fury of bejewelled costumes, mesmerising the room with razor-sharp isolations, shimmering hip shimmies and effortless fluid grace. On The House noted that a companion who had studied belly dance for a year was floored by her technique.
None of this came without resistance. When she started performing in Mumbai, her parents were supportive of her learning but did not want her on stage. She performed anyway, sometimes without telling them, coming home late to houses with locked doors. The Indian community was not always welcoming either. People did not expect an Indian woman to belly dance authentically. At shows, audiences sometimes assumed she was Turkish or Egyptian.
“I hear comments,” she says. “But I don’t let it bog me down. I think, whose life is this? Mine.”
However, her husband has backed her throughout, even convincing her mother to let her teach dance and turning up to every show in Mumbai.
For nine years, she balanced a career in education with dance. Two weeks ago, feeling burnt out, she left to reassess what comes next.
At thirty-six, she is performing at Luna Park in a show she could not have imagined when she was a sixteen-year-old girl in Mumbai who could not talk to people.
“When I started, I wanted to do so much but I didn’t see the opportunities,” she says. “But there was so much fire in my heart. I never imagined I’d be performing at Luna Park, at a Finucane and Smith show, alongside such exceptional artists.”
Dance Palace is playing at Luna Palace, Luna Park Melbourne, until 12 September 2026. For tickets, click here
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