Indian Contemporary Dance as Political Movement

Wednesday, 17 September 2025 | 3:00 p.m. to 4:30 p.m. | Room 280A, Second Floor, York Lanes, Keele Campus, York University

With Ameera Nimjee (Yale University)

Discussant: Bridget Cauthery (York University)

Mandeep Raikhy is a Delhi-based contemporary dancer who has produced work as a choreographer, dancer, curator, and director of well-known contemporary forums in India like Gati and its festival Ignite. Based on ethnographic fieldwork conducted in Hamburg, Delhi and virtually, this talk explicates how staging political dissent is at the heart of Raikhy’s approach to making contemporary dance. I offer a method for close-reading Raikhy’s choreography, where he builds a kinesthetic vocabulary iteratively for audience members to absorb, inviting them into alternative political worlds. He choreographs everyday movement to connect explicitly to larger political movements. In doing so, Raikhy presents dance as movement in the performance of protest. Case studies include his currently touring work Hallucinations of an Artifact, the grassroots social media piece The Secular Project, and a work-in-progress on the nude dancing body.

Ameera Nimjee is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Music, with affiliations in Theater, Dance, and Performance Studies and the South Asian Studies Council at Yale University. Her primary research is on the study of bodies, movement and transnational politics in South Asian performance cultures. Ameera is currently at work on two larger projects: on creativity in South Asian contemporary dance economies and performances of migration among Ismaili Muslims.
Her essays have been published in various journals and volumes, such as South Asia: Journal of South Asian Studies and Music and Dance as Everyday South Asia (Oxford 2024). Also a performer, Ameera is a member of Toronto-based Chhandam Dance Company under the continued direction of her teacher of 18 years, Joanna De Souza.

This is the first event in Demos, Democracy, Democratization: South Asia Lecture Series 2025–26. Learn more at this link.