Choreographies of Erasure

Timing

18:00 – 19:00 — Performance, Artist Talk & Q&A
19:00 – 20:30 — Food Sale & Fundraiser for Sudan

The South Asian dance form Kathak was once shaped by tawaifs - female artists of different faiths, predominantly Muslim and Hindu, from present-day Pakistan and North India. Before colonial and nationalist reforms, the performances of these fiercely independent women - blending music, poetry, and dance - created spaces of cultural power and joy, even zones of resistance where patriarchal and colonial orders were subverted, and where freedom fighters found refuge.

Seen as a threat to both Brahmanical patriarchy and British rule, these women’s worlds were dismantled: their art criminalized, their history rewritten. Kathak was reframed as a sanitized, male-dominated, Hindu-Brahmin tradition within the emerging nationalist imagination of India - erasing the very bodies that once defined it.

Choreographies of Erasure returns to these silenced lineages through the dancing body as a living archive - containing traces of suppressed stories, marginal gestures, and feminist resistance. It is both performance and excavation, memory work and political critique.

In re-embodying what has been forgotten, we resist the narratives of purity and dominance that still shape this dance form today. This is not a nostalgic look backward - it is an act of radical presence, a dance toward other futures. Join us for its first public presentation, featuring a performance, artist talk, and Q&A.

This project is supported by Kemmler Foundation.