Urmika Devi performs ballet, jazz, Indian dance.

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Urmika Devi was an 18-year-old aspiring dancer when she first met Tucson schoolteacher Lydia Peera.

"I had just given a performance in town," said Devi, a Philadelphia resident with Tucson ties. "She came up to me and told me to please come back. She was holding a fundraiser and wanted me to perform. It was very striking to me that someone would ask me to do that."

Peera's encouragement had a lasting effect on Devi, who was thinking about giving up dance to study more socially conscious subjects at George Washington University.

Devi, now 23, never stopped dancing. She kept in touch with Peera, minored in movement in college and spent the first half of this summer training at the Martha Graham Center of Contemporary Dance in New York City. Saturday, she will honor Peera, who died from breast cancer in 2006, with a full-length choreographed production at the Stevie Eller Dance Theatre.

The performance, titled "Ma, M[r]s. & Movement: Tales of Goddesses and Heroines, Mothers and Wives, Women Shaping History," is taking place to help raise money for a University of Arizona scholarship endowment in Peera's name.

"This is a community event," Devi said. "A lot of people may not have known about Lydia. She was a really wonderful woman and powerful in the community. This will be totally in memory of her."

The eight-piece presentation will be a two-fold event: four classical Indian works and four modern movement pieces put on by Devi and members of Tucson's own dance community, including Amber Eubanks, Gauri Pathak and Yumi Shirai.

The production will focus on the importance of women in society.

Devi has studied ballet, jazz and modern dance since she was a child. She has been a student of the classical Indian dance style known as Bharata Natyam since age 13.

"The two forms are very different," Devi said. "In Western dance you are told to uplift yourself, jump higher, leap farther. In classical Indian dance the whole posture is different. You are in like a semi-plié the entire time. I struggled a little bit with the technical aspects of both, but that is why my choreography today is the way it is. I spoke these two different languages. That was an advantage."

Among the original works set to run are "In Dreams," a piece "about the idea that people pass in and out of different times and spaces," and "River Ganges," the work that brought Peera and Devi together in the first place.

Devi hopes that audience members will see that dance forms don't have to be restrictive and that a strong dance community can be found in today's youth.

Above all, she wants people to come away with a sense of her appreciation for all that Peera did for her.

"In classical Indian dance, it is not just you as a dancer in the studio. It is about you as a dancer imparting something to the audience. That is the goal — that the audience feels something from that. I always felt very tied to that. Creating a story right then and there in one single space. When people leave the performance, each person takes home something very different."