Active Re-Encountering

By Erica Li

  • Founded in 2012, Nava Dance Theatre (NDT) is a bharatanatyam dance company rooted in the South Indian form yet driven by a contemporary and justice-centered artistic practice. Through new works, residencies, workshops, and community programming, NDT creates layered, socially engaged art that uplifts historically underrepresented stories and forges powerful intersections between culturally specific art, diaspora, and community care.

    Rogue Gestures/Foreign Bodies uses bharatanatyam and experimental movement to examine the labor of South Asian immigrant women who came to the US after the 1965 Immigration and Nationality Act. Inspired by the oral histories of Indian nurses who immigrated to the US due to labor shortages, choreographer Nadhi Thekkek, and her collaborators explore the heavy and enduring work of brown women and the worlds they traverse between. They ask, who puts a price on this labor? What is the cost of opportunity? Who gets to decide how foreign we are? Through community interviews, historical texts, and poetry, Rogue Gestures/Foreign Bodies negotiates these questions and examines what it means to belong in America.

It has been almost a year since I saw Nava Dance Theatre perform their piece Rogue Gesture/Foreign Bodies, and I can still feel the energy in the hall from that night. It was a joyous embodiment of the hidden histories of many South Asian women who emigrated to the US in the 1960s: joy in the overdue recognition of their histories, and joy in a re-ecountering of their personhood. 

Image courtesy Nava Dance Theatre

The storytelling started the moment I walked into the doors of the auditorium and was handed the program for the night in the form of a newspaper. Printed on thin off-white paper, the program rustled open, revealing grayscale pages filled with text that recorded a history I’d never heard before. Like many times when I encounter a hidden history of marginalized people, I was not shocked by its existence so much as saddened by my lack of knowing it and curious about what new wrinkle it would mark in my learned preconception of the world. The form of a newspaper struck me especially as I held it; it felt like a statement of defiance and regained autonomy that those whose histories had been ignored were writing their own facts and acting as stewards of their own realities. The form of newspapers is heralded as announcer and keeper of facts but as time has revealed, traditional news outlets have only deemed certain things as stories worthy of printing. Nava’s use of the newspaper as a program renegotiated whose stories get to be chronicled and considered fact. 

They further bend the form of newspapers by highlighting imagery of personhood. Rather than the traditional newspaper’s shocking and incendiary images, this program collaged images of letters, phones, figures, and tickets that depict lives lived and the struggles of immigration. Artistic director Nadhi Thekkek shared that “[her] own nostalgia [and her] conversations with aunties [are] rooted in memories and their own artifacts like newspaper cut outs. There were also pictures, photo albums, but also jewelry, sarees, and letters, lots and lots of letters”. This practice of self archiving one’s life is familiar for many immigrant families, where some pieces of history only exist through recalled memories and yellowing photos. The physical manifestation of those histories become valued archives for not only that generation, but the generations after to have a glimpse into the stories they come from. Nava reimagines what recording that history could be, re-ecountering these hidden realities sonically, visually, and physically.  

Image courtesy Nava Dance Theatre

The performance by Nava was a beautifully symbiosis of honed craft that engaged the audience in this encountering of the past. Using the classical dance form of bharatanatyam and contemporary movement, dancers skillfully ebbed between direct embodiment of bodies and the unleashed physical embodiment of emotions. Musicians on one side of the stage blended live traditional music instruments and vocalizations with Western instruments and musical and field recordings. In a scene where they are focusing on “what is the sound of labor”, they used more metals, an airplane sound, and a wooden plank to sonically allude to the building of new lives for these women. Most of the music was based in improvisation, bringing the dancers and musicians into a continuous conversation across and within groups. The choregraphy that grounded this performance was rooted in oral histories lovingly gathered and casually passed down from relatives. This expanded the conversation across generations, breaking the temporal divide as they immersed themselves into these pasts. One of the creative co-investigators of the piece shared that she inherently embodies these histories, both on and off stage, trusting that they are always there and she can always reach for them. The performers’ embodiment gives life and active re-encountering of the past to allow for liberatory reimagination and recognition of these otherwise hidden realities.