Tribeca Performing Arts Center presents Parijat Desai Dance Company

On Saturday, June 5th, the Tribeca Performing Arts Center presents the Parijat Desai Dance Company, as they present two new works in development: Songs To Live For and Make Space.

Songs To Live For, a dance theater work based on Hindustani vocal music, explores the profound longing evoked by this thumri and khayal in particular. Responding to the quality of the music—its spacious vocals and rhythmic punctuations—Desai draws on released movement from postmodern dance, and weaves in classical gesture in new ways.

Desai uses thumri as a vehicle to investigate gender and desire. Hindustani music is rich with romantic poetry written by various poets — Sufis, Hindu bhakts, Sikhs, men, and women — and sometimes expresses queer desire. As the work develops, Desai will also look at the music’s potent history: patronage by the Mughals rulers of both Muslim and Hindu artists.

Set to electronic music by South Asian American artists, Make Space rewires the sculptural positions of bharata natyam using postmodern/modern dance techniques, and remixes classical footwork patterns in response to contemporary beats. Dancers undulate and slide their bodies, creating openings within rigid classical forms. Desai also experiments with spatial relationships between bodies, traveling those new forms out into space, into the floor, into the air.

Parijat Desai, Aditi Dhruv, Kiley Durst, Belinda He, Mohan Kulasingam, Cori Marquis, Riyo Mito
Projection designed by: Swati Khurana and Neeraj Churi
Admission: $10

Tribeca Performing Arts Center (TPAC), Theater 2

199 Chambers Street
New York, NY