Critical Path presents: Indian contemporary dancer Tishani Doshi in conversation with Amrita Hepi
Part performance, part video, part talk – join us for an intimate evening with Indian contemporary dancer Tishani Doshi as she traces her career in India, and shares what her exchange with legendary choreographer Chandralekha meant for her artistic oeuvre. Specifically speaking to the work SHARIRA, a 63 minute work developed over 15 long years with Chandralekha, Doshi unpacks what it really takes to demand the complete attention of the audience. The choreographer’s notes for SHARIRA reads, “Sharira is about the profound and invisible female energies that can activate our outer and inner selves. Sharira explores the body as a transformative field for ascending feminine force, to evoke the condition within which the ‘self’ can experience the world. Sharira celebrates the living thing in which sexuality, sensitivity and spirituality co-exist-acknowledging no limit, borders, boundaries”.
The presentation will be followed by a conversation facilitated by First Nations dancer/choreographer Amrita Hepi in which the duo discuss their interventions in decolonising aesthetics and embodying feminisms.
This event is supported by Australia Council for the Arts and Parramatta Artists’ Studios
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Tishani Doshi Bio:
Tishani Doshi is the author of five books of fiction and poetry. At the age of twenty-six, an encounter with the choreographer Chandralekha led her to an unexpected career in dance. Tishani’s debut novel, THE PLEASURE SEEKERS, was shortlisted for the Hindu Literary Prize and long-listed for the Orange Prize and the International IMPAC Dublin Literary Award. She believes that dance and literature have intersected and influenced each other in her practice. She currently lives on a beach between two fishing villages in Tamil Nadu, India with her husband and three dogs.
Amrita Hepi Bio:
Amrita Hepi is a First Nations choreographer and dancer from Bundjulung and Ngapuhi territories. Her mission as an artist is to push the barriers of intersectionality and make work that garners multiple access points through allegories drawn from the body and objects. An artist with a broad following and reach, her work has taken various forms (film, performance, sculpture, text, lecture, participatory installation) but always begins from working with the body as a point of archive, memory and resistance.
Image supplied by the artist