Dr. Nadhi Thekkek is the Artistic Director of Nava Dance Theatre, creating contemporary Bharatanatyam works that explore identity, migration, and belonging through a South Asian diasporic lens. Her work has been supported by the National Endowment for the Arts, NEFA National Dance Project, The MAP Fund, and the California Arts Council, and she is a recipient of the Dance/USA Fellowship. An educator and mentor, Nadhi also directs Nava’s Unrehearsed Artist Residency and continues her Bharatanatyam training with Guru A. Lakshmanaswamy in Chennai.
Nava Dance Theatre (NDT), founded in 2012 is a Bharatanatyam dance company rooted in the South Indian form yet driven by a contemporary and justice centered artistic practice. Our mission is to use Bharatanatyam as a medium to explore identity, place and politics through the lens of lived experience. Through new works, residencies, workshops, and community programming, we create 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 is a Bharatanatyam, experimental movement, and live music experiences of women and immigrants in the US, and how these fractured experiences inform our identities now. The work shows that together we are stronger, inclusive of the nuances and contradictions that we all hold in our bodies. Initially inspired by the oral histories of Indian nurses who arrived as a result of the 1965 Immigration and Nationality Act, choreographer Nadhi Thekkek, and her collaborators find universality in the heavy and enduring work of immigrant women and the worlds they traverse between.
Rogue Gestures
Dancers: Shruti Abhishek, Abirami Murugappan, Janani Muthaiya, Nadhi Thekkek and Lalli Venkat
Music Credits: Music direction by Roopa Mahadevan and Kalaisan Kalaichelvan, with additional compositions by GS Rajan and Sruti Sarathy.
Recording by musicians Roopa Mahadevan, Aarti Shankar, Aditya Iswara, Conal Sathi, Matt Small and dancers Shruti Abhishek, Soundarya Daliparthy, and Nadhi Thekkek.
SATURDAY, SEPTEMBER 12, 7 – 8:30 PM
1395 Presidents’ Cir, Salt Lake City, UT 84112
(801)-581-7100