Echoes of the Moving Body

“O body swayed to music, O brightening glance,
How can we know the dancer from the dance?” — W.B. Yeats

On World Dance Day, we invite you into this dissolving space between dancer and dance—where form meets feeling, stillness meets motion, and art becomes lived experience.

Our celebration this year unfolds across disciplines, perspectives, and rhythms. We begin by pausing—through the lens of photographer Shalini Jain—as she captures movement in stillness and the stories told in a dancer’s fleeting gesture. From this quiet contemplation, we shift into the immediacy of the body: A Meeting, a contemporary duet by Gayatri Shetty and Ronita Mukherjee, explores presence, dialogue, and connection through movement.

As the evening deepens, we journey into Rhythms of the Divine a confluence of Indian classical forms—Bharatanatyam, Kuchipudi, Mohiniyattam and Kathak—brought to life by Gauri Diwakar, Sujata Nair Sanjay, Gururaju, Minal Prabhu, and the Mudrika Foundation. Here, tradition is not static but ever evolving, and every step becomes a living archive.

Across these experiences, we celebrate dance not only as performance, but as conversation—between bodies, between time periods, between disciplines. Join us as we honor the infinite ways dance speaks, moves, and transforms.

Schedule:

5pm | Seminar Hall

Stillness in Dance

A talk on Dance Photography by Shalini Jain

6 pm | Gallery 

A Meeting

A Contemporary Dance Duet by Gayatri Shetty and Ronita Mukherjee

7 pm |Auditorium

Rhythms of the Divine

A solo, duet and group dance performance by Gauri Diwakar, Sujata Nair Sanjay, Gururaju, Minal Prabhu and Mudrika Foundation for Indian Performing Arts