A Living Practice: Curating Choreographers’ Evening

I grew up in the Twin Cities dance community. I was twelve years old when my mother, Ranee, founded Ragamala Dance Company, and even before then, I was playing in the aisles of The Southern Theater and performing as a peacock and a deer onstage at The O’Shaughnessy. Dance has shaped not only my artistic life but also my understanding of community, identity, and the ways we carry knowledge, embody personal experiences, and foster a shared humanity.

My lifelong practice of Bharatanatyam, a South Indian classical dance form, has provided me with a unique lens through which I engage with other artistic disciplines and genres of dance. As a choreographer, I have worked across movement traditions and collaborated with artists whose practices and perspectives differ significantly from my own. These experiences have deepened my curiosity about how artists approach movement, musicality, and storytelling in distinct ways, and how different artistic languages can illuminate one another.

My grounding in Bharatanatyam has never felt limiting. Rather, I see it as a foundation from which to explore, question, and create. Working across forms has taught me to recognize artistic integrity even in the absence of shared aesthetic values or movement vocabulary. It is from this perspective, and with a deep appreciation for the community that shaped me, that I am honored to curate this year’s Choreographers’ Evening.

My favorite dance experiences are rooted in rigorous, multidisciplinary inquiry and emerge from disciplined practices charged with the weight of specific lived history At its most compelling, dance emerges from the convergence of movement, music, poetics, and psychology as an organic, composite entity that resonates long after the performance ends.

These interests shaped the questions I posed to artists auditioning for Choreographers’ Evening. How do we transmit and receive knowledge with both authority and humility? How do we carry forward what we have inherited from the past while remaining responsive to the needs and realities of our time? How do musicality and an understanding of rhythm inform the choreographic process? And how do ideas move from research, observation, or reflection into physical form?

Underlying these questions is a curiosity about the relationships among discipline and imagination, research and embodiment, inheritance and innovation, music and movement. I was interested not in prescribing a particular approach but in understanding how each artist navigates these relationships through their own practice.

I was drawn to the ten selected artists for a variety of reasons: musicality, rigor, humor, integrity, intelligence, and their individual artistic voices. Each brings a particular relationship to movement and a different understanding of what dance can communicate, and I know that experiencing their varying aesthetics together will highlight each artist’s compelling approach and sense of purpose.

Choreographers’ Evening offers an opportunity to encounter multiple artistic worlds in a single performance. Each work asks us to shift our attention, enter a different set of possibilities, and consider the many ways an idea, experience, or question can find expression through the body.

Decades after running through the halls of the Hennepin Center for the Arts as a preteen, I still find myself discovering new ways to see and understand dance through the artists around me. Choreographers’ Evening represents both a celebration of individual expression and a reflection of the community that makes such expression possible, and I’m thrilled to be part of this ongoing conversation.