After years of training, the students join the traveling professional group, Nrityagram. At 7:30 p.m. Wednesday, they will perform at Wharton Center’s Cobb Great Hall.

Awoken at 6 a.m., the girls go for an early morning run and then spend an hour on physical conditioning. Between breakfast and lunch, they spend three hours training in Odissi dance. In the afternoon, they work to grow their own food, build the school and cook in the kitchen. In the evening, there still is more dance training.

“There are very few people who want to do it the way we do,” Sen said. “To find dancers who believe in practicing in the traditional way that we do are few and far between. Those who do come to us and are able to last out are special people. It is not just talent; it is also a lot of mental resilience.”

“We are totally committed to bringing the best world music and dance to Wharton Center,” said Bob Hoffman, public relations director for Wharton Center. “We want audiences who leave Wharton Center to know they don’t have to go to India to see the best in music and dance. They can go to Wharton Center, right in their backyard.”

Nrityagram was started by an Odissi dancer named Protima Gauri Bedi in 1990.

“(Bedi) came to dance late in life,” Sen said. “She walked into the wrong auditorium and found this exquisite dance performance and decided then and there her whole life was going to change. Before that she was a flower child of the ’60s, ’70s — the type of person who wouldn’t learn Indian classical dance. But overnight, she found it transformed her whole personality — gave her meaning in life. After 15 years of performing, she decided there should be a place for people to dream, to eat, sleep (and) breath dance. The people who had the talent and the dedication to surrender their life to hard work.”

In addition to changing the lives of its students, Nrityagram also is devoted to conveying the stories and heritage of Indian culture to the world.

“Dance and music (are) a repository of all the allied art forms: music, literature, poetry, sculpture, philosophy, religion. It encompasses all these art forms,” Sen said. “The fact that it takes 2,000 years to make it obviously means thousands of minds have contributed to it. It becomes a repository of a whole culture because it has been developed over so many years.”

Shreelina Ghosh, a doctoral student at MSU, has practiced Odissi dance for more than 25 years. She said that Nritygram is an important part of preserving Indian culture.

“It’s a 2,000-year-old dance form, where the student will go to the home of the teacher and be there, stay there,” Ghosh said. “Nrityagram is one of the very few dance schools. We’ve tried to maintain the 2,000-year-old tradition, the heritage of India.”

In addition to preserving the culture of India, Sen said that dance is important for communicating history and stories across societies.

“Art is a universal phenomenon, and the communication of art transcends all boundaries,” she said. “In India, we are so different. What we have to contribute, it’s centuries of knowledge in the art form. It’s something everyone should have access to.

“There’s nothing that is not universally human in the dance. Everybody can relate to it. It’s just, I’m doing it in the language I know, and someone else is doing it in the language they know, but we must be able to communicate with each other. Art is a way to bridge those gaps.”