Parijat Desai Dance Company Songs to Live For - Dance

Songs To Live For explores the profound romantic and spiritual longing evoked by Hindustani vocal music—love songs called thumri and khayal, in particular. Dancers move solo, in pairs and as an ensemble, responding to the music's spacious vocals, rhythmic punctuations and nuances of poetry. Parijat Desai's choreography blends fluid movements from postmodern dance with gesture/expression from Indian classical dance. This dance theater work is enhanced by visuals referencing India's Mughal courts, where this music was originally fostered.

Set to electronic music with Indian influences, Make Space rewires the sculptural positions of Indian classical dance (bharata natyam). Dancers undulate and slide their bodies, creating openings within rigid classical forms, travelling those forms out into space, into the floor, into the air. Desai also remixes classical footwork patterns in response to contemporary beats.

Parijat Desai Dance Company performs a hybrid of Indian classical and modern dance the New York Times called a “seamless blending of the new and old.” Choreographer Parijat Desai brings together the lines, rhythms and theatricality of Indian classical dance with the dynamism and conceptual experimentation of modern dance, creating new vocabularies that move across boundaries of tradition and culture. PDDC has been presented by venues including the Grand Performances and Skirball Cultural Center (LA); Northwestern University (Chicago); and Danspace Project, La MaMa, BRIC Studio, and Queens Museum of Art (NY). PDDC also performed at The Other Festival (India) and in Desh Pardesh (Toronto). The company is a 2008 recipient of the New York Foundation for the Arts BUILD grant.

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