ONLINE EVENTS

To learn about PDC’s online events (dance classes and virtual dance party/vigil), held March–June 2020 visit the PDC Online page.

PARDON MY HEART

Parijat reimagines Indian "classical" dance's heroine (the nayika). Her nayika melodramatically lovelorn and self-involved at first, but eventually becomes more real and concerned with healing the wounds of the nation. The script weaves together dialogue with voiced-over poetry by Black poet/scholar Marcus Jackson (author of book and poem Pardon My Heart), and spoken stanzas by legendary Pakistani reformer and poet Faiz Ahmad Faiz, translated by Kashmiri poet Aga Shahid Ali. These texts voice facets of the nayika’s psyche.

Performed with music played live by Kiran Ahluwalia (vocal), Arun Ramamurthy (violin), Neel Murgai (sitar), and Ehren Hanson (tabla). Supported by CUNY Dance Initiative and a Lower Manhattan Cultural Council Creative Engagement Grant.

O.O.F. (studies in the opposite of fear)

Performed in a mutable set of living plants, lanterns, lamps, and earthen pots, O.O.F. brings together improvisational solo and group movement scores, performance lecture with audience participation, and full-out group circle dancing. It's a meditation on how to ground and activate ourselves in an environment of xenophobia.  

Parijat sought to acknowledge this climate, and cultivate an alternate emotional state to the pervasive anxiety we experience as immigrants. In solo sections, she travels through multiple vocabularies of dance, performed inside distinct configurations of plants. She also interrupt the dance with a tongue-in-cheek monologue advocating for a new vowel for our English alphabet.

Her collaborating dancers arrange plants in space and move inside those configurations. Together, we gradually build a collective energy through circle dance. Through each phase in the process, dancers bring their own movement voices and stories into our shared vocabulary.

Ensemble [70 min] presented December 2018 at CPR - Center for Performance Research. Solo [20 min] presented 2017–18 at La Mama Theater, 92nd St Y, Movement Research at Judson Church, and in 2019 at Asia Society. 

Photos by Kathryn Butler

Meet our O. O. F. collaborators here.

JustLikeThat/Maya

Ensemble work exploring state language around national security, obfuscation and what lies beneath the words. Considering legal and official language in the U.S. and India—two large, militarized democracies who police their borders and Others in the name of the nation. [30 min]