A recent achievement I am especially proud of is FRAGMENTS, a dance research project that brings together my work in Kathak and academia. It grew out of my postdoctoral research on shifting identities and changing artistic representations within Kathak traditions in South Asia and the diaspora.
The project draws on ethnographic fieldwork in the UK, Australia, and South Africa, along with my earlier research among Kathak communities in north-central India and my own experience as a practitioner. Through personal narratives, neo-classical Kathak vocabulary, and contemporary performance aesthetics, I developed the work as an embodied archive.
FRAGMENTS explores belonging, cultural memory, hybridity, rupture, and resistance. It looks at how tradition is reinterpreted, who holds authority over it, how cultural and somatic memory are carried within the diasporic body, and what happens when the body moves between cultures. It also examines liminality, hybrid identity, intercultural exchange, and the role of artistic practice in generating knowledge.
The process involved years of research, fieldwork, reflection, and movement practice. What makes the project meaningful to me is that it allows dance not only to express ideas, but also to investigate them and produce new knowledge.
