Aparna Nambiar

I teach dance and performance theory and technique. My scholarship and practice, in a nutshell, is about the reimagining Asian dance as dynamic, intercultural, experimental and contemporary rather than simply “ethnic.” I am deeply interested in teaching students how to dance with a fluid vocabulary that draws from many sources. 

As diaspora often do, I came to understand what it means to be South Asian through early and sustained studies of dance as a cultural experience. My studio practice is grounded in classical Indian Odissi training, informed by the philosophies of Intercultural Theatre—to deeply respect traditional performance practices, draw from their techniques and create work that inspires and activates contemporary audiences. This notion of an intercultural, contemporary Asian dance came to me as a founding member of the dance company, Chowk Productions, Singapore. 

As Odissi practitioners, we also invited teachers of Japanese Noh and Butoh, Indonesian Wayang Wong, various theatre techniques and the Indian marital art forms of Seraikela Chhau and Kalari Payattu to shape our training and creation. Our performances have been seen in Singapore, Kolkata, Washington D.C., Berkeley and Belgrade As a teacher and practitioner, I believe in adapting this knowledge to tell stories of our complex, multiethnic and multipolar world today. Current Research I received my doctorate in Performance Studies at the University of California, Berkeley in 2022. 

I am currently working on my book project on the emergent future of Asian experimental choreography. This work studies the link between choreography and capital in Inter-Asia and Asia-Europe networks today. 

Besides analyzing choreographies, I also look at arts funding and infrastructures and networks—the conditions of productions in which dancers make and show their work. I articulate how these pragmatic and mundane conditions of production a) changes traditional dance techniques and creates precarity on the one hand, while b) disrupting Orientalist ways of seeing Asian bodies and articulating new genres of performance, on the other. 

My writings on cross-generic Asian performance have already yielded three peer reviewed publications in Performance Research, Inter-Asia Culture Studies and Critical Stages. I am currently working on an edited volume on Dance and Ecology. The essays in this volume focus on how practitioners in a range of sites across Asia and the Pacific— from Indonesia to Japan, from Hawaii to the Marquesas, from Singapore to India—are linking notions of indigeneity, politics and performance through dance.