2025 October 22, 6 pm, Vilnius University Theatre hall
Dance Project “fragments” // Post-performance Academic Discussion „Embodied Departures in Kathak: Diaspora, Identity, and the Performative Body “
“fragments” is a postdoctoral research-performance project that investigates the shifting terrain of diasporic identity through the embodied lens of evolving practices of Kathak dance. It emerges from ethnographic material collected during the recent fieldwork in the UK, Australia and South Africa, as part of the postdoctoral project „Shifting Identities and Changing Artistic Representations: Transformations of the Kathak Dance Tradition in South Asia and Diasporic Spaces “. The project is further informed by earlier research (2017–2020) among Kathak communities in central northern India and my own experiences as Kathak practitioner.
Drawing on personal narratives, movement vocabularies rooted in neo-classical Kathak tradition, and contemporary performance aesthetics, the dance unfolds as an embodied archive — reflecting on belonging, cultural memory, hybridity, rupture, and resistance — and traces how inherited traditions are carried, fractured, and transformed across geographies. As the body navigates displacement and rootedness, it opens a space for dialogue between past and present, origin and adaptation, collective and individual memory.
Grounded in a practice-as-research methodology, this project emphasizes the role of embodied knowledge and artistic practice as critical tools for investigating the ecology of Kathak dance tradition across contexts. It aims to create a participatory encounter where dance becomes not only a mode of aesthetic expression, but also the ground for researchers, students, members of diasporic communities, and artists to think through and reflect on issues of cultural and performing identity, embodied tradition and artistic representation in recontextualized spaces.
• Embodied Departures and Trajectories (How are cultural traditions reinterpreted in diasporic contexts? Who has the authority to carry and adapt "tradition"?)
• Embodied Memory and the Diasporic Body (In what ways does the body store and transmit cultural knowledge? What role does somatic memory play in constructing identity?)
• Staging the In-Between: Liminality and Cultural Hybridity (How do performance and identity intersect in the “in-between” spaces? Is there an aesthetic of diaspora that is distinct from national or traditional forms?
• Transforming the Performative Body (How is the performer’s body reshaped by migration, hybrid identity, and intercultural exchange? What aesthetic choices reflect cultural negotiation, and which reflect rupture?)
• The Role of Practice-as-Research (How can artistic practice generate and communicate knowledge? What are the ethical, methodological, and epistemological implications of performance-based research?)
Moderated panel:
• Moderator - Assoc. Prof. Dr Deimantas Valančiūnas – Head of the Institute of Asian and Transcultural Studies. Fields of inquiry: Asian (India, Chinese, Japanese, Taiwan) cinema; Asian popular and visual culture; Genre cinema (horror, gothic, sci-fi) in Asia; Diasporic literature and cinema; Contemporary South Asian literature; Cultural memory/trauma studies; Public culture, media and representation; Modernisation processes in South Asia and postcolonial theory
• Prof. (HP) Dr Audrius Beinorius - Supervisor of the postdoctoral research project. Fields of inquiry: Indian philosophy and religion, Buddhism in India and Asia, Yogacara Buddhist school, Reception of Asian Philosophy in the West, Asian cosmology, astrology and divination, Asian and Cultural psychology, Comparative Religion Studies, Postcolonial Studies, Hermeneutics
• Prof. Urmimala Munsi Sarkar - Senior Fellow at Prime Ministers Museum and Library. Fields of inquiry: critical dance studies, dance and society, dancing body gender and performance, documentation of living traditions, and performance as politics
• Prof. Dr Victor de Munck. Fields of inquiry: Sociocultural anthropology, cognitive anthropology, cross-cultural research, cultural models, Sri Lanka, romantic love
• Dr Debanjali Biswas. Fields of inquiry: socio-cultural anthropology and theatre, performance and dance studies, performance cultures as sites of contestation and agency drawing on ethnographic, archival and practice-as-research methods
• Assoc. Prof. Dr Sarah Morelli - Chair of the Department of Musicology and Ethnomusicology at the University of Denver’s Lamont School of Music. Fields of inquiry: performing arts in South Asia and diaspora, Kathak dance, Hindustani music
The performance and post-performance conversation are parts of a broader postdoctoral research inquiry „Shifting Identities and Changing Artistic Representations: Transformations of the Kathak Dance Tradition in South Asia and Diasporic Spaces “.
This project has received funding from the Research Council of Lithuania (LMTLT), agreement No S-PD-24-100.
