Image courtesy Coley Curry

The Collaborative Action Dance Project

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coming soon

Look into my Voice, Hear my Dance (LVHD)
2019-2020

LVHD is a collaboration of Bharata Natyam dancers and survivors of sexual and domestic violence to bring their stories to the community.  The project began with an introduction and exploration of different approaches to dancing and creating with BN, including Bharata Nrityam, with 4 BN dancers at ASU.  With these additional creative tools and an introductory advocacy training by ACESDV staff Doreen, the dancers paired up with 4 survivor-members through ACESDV, while 3 survivor-members worked directly with Sumana to generate their own pieces.  We were actively sharing, creating, thinking and dancing together for the past year and strung this garland of mini-performances for you to experience.  LVHD is a collaborative action dance project:  it is dance as a language of empowerment; it is joining a movement to end violence in our communities; it is awakening a collective consciousness.  It seeks to do what dance has always done—build community for everyone.
Glimpses at:  LVHD Seen

Information & Booking:
The LVHD collaborative action dance project can be shared as a summer intensive or as a residency for dance, especially Bharata Natyam, in creating a project for participants to engage with their community about a justice issue of their choice.  The LVHD collaborative action dance project is suitable for all ages in studio, K-12 or higher education settings.
Contact Dansense to book the "LVHD collaborative action dance project" for your students/institution.

Photos by Ri Lindegren

KRITI
2019

Photos by Lawrence Fung

Kriti is a choreographic work of about 15 minutes in collaboration with 8 dancers and 4 Indian musicians exploring how tradition can be translated from ancient thought to contemporary lived experiences through various movement practices with a grounding in Bharata Nrityam and Carnatic music.  A multicultural work that treats ancient stories of Ganesha with contemporary perspectives, it leads to individual and collective discoveries about common values and questions we have as human beings across time and borders. 
What is a story? How do we listen? I love our stories and learn something new from them with every retelling. Those who made them gave us so many different ways of seeing wisdom. Perhaps that is part of the wisdom— to keep looking from different perspectives. So, with the help of my co-conspirator artists, we share an exploration of the stories that evoke Ganesha and the ideas we gleaned from them, utilizing our varied, yet collective approaches. The original Bharata-Natyam choreography by N. Srikanth appears as a reminder to recognize our roots and foundations, even as we set out to explore new frontiers.

Information & Booking:
Kriti can be commissioned as a performance of the original set work or as a short dance-intensive to explore the basic process of a collaborative action dance project and create a choreography, using Bharata Nrityam pedagogy and somatics, unique to the intensive's participants.
Contact Dansense to book the "Kriti collaborative action dance project" for your students/institution.