The Foundation for Indian Contemporary Art and Gati Dance Forum invite you to a conversation with dancer Preethi Athreya as part of the Body Space Time Conversation Series.
Date: Wednesday, 9 May 2018
Time: 5:30 pm onwards
Venue: FICA Reading Room, S-17, First floor, Khirki Extension,
Malviya Nagar (Opposite Select City Walk, Saket)
New Delhi: 110017
Entry Free
The Foundation for Indian Contemporary Art, in collaboration with Gati Dance Forum, features dancerPreethi Athreya as part of the Body Space Time Conversations series, which is designed to invite a range of practitioners into the studio and engage them in a discussion about performance and its intersection with other disciplines. The series is part of BODY SPACE TIME, an ongoing 4-month certificate course in dance technique and choreography, running from Jan - May 2018 at Gati Dance Forum. It populates a context for the participants of the Body Space Time course, allowing them to engage with creative processes through their own practice and a wider dialogue. It also creates a space for practitioners to share their practice with the larger public, triggering a critical discourse that links various methodologies and forms.
This week, we look forward to an evening with Preethi Athreya, a Chennai-based contemporary dancer who trained in Bharatanatyam and later went on to do a postgraduate degree in Dance Studies (Laban Centre, London, 2001). Keenly conscious of her need to be not be defined as the exotic other, she chose to continue her journey in her native Chennai. Preethi is one of the co-founders of Basement 21, a practice-based performance collective in Chennai.
In her talk, Preethi questions how we can act from the body in a hypercapitalist society.
"We live in a hyper capitalist society that is under no threat from the practitioners of art so long as the project of art does not function as a critical and emancipatory agency. How can we resist being consumed, how can we re-invite the body’s autonomy? We have to resist, in our times, the mediation of a bourgeoisie, from within the country and from outside, in defining our contemporaneity or Indianness; we have to keep our agency. It may be the only way to guard the critical energies released through creation from being co-opted by its opponents."
The Gati Dance Forum is a pioneering arts initiative that works in the field of contemporary dance. Founded in 2007, Gati has consistently searched for avenues to create a sustainable environment for the development of contemporary dance practice in the country through a body of pioneering and innovative projects that attempt to address areas as diverse as pedagogy, creation, research, outreach and arts advocacy and policy.