Courtyard Dancers

Upcoming in the Fall 2007:

November 16-17, 2007, World Premiere of "Replaced Rituals" at the Painted Bride Art Center in Philadelphia - 7:00pm

Courtyard Dancers, a diverse body of performers, creates and stages contemporary dance based on classical Indian forms such as Kathak and other classical and folk forms from India.  Our mission is to explore through our dance-works the interdependence between art, life, and labor. 

• We are interested in developing a community of artists and audiences who experience art and culture both in aesthetic and political terms. We believe that artistic creations should include intellectual pursuits that respond to the crosscurrents of social change.
• We juxtapose the beauty of the classical forms with pedestrian movements and everyday gestures to create our own collages of life. We draw on the expressive power of classical forms to narrate stories of the under-represented and the marginal, the everyday, and the mundane, to evoke dramatic and powerful images of ordinary life.  Many of our themes are on women, desire, and labor, (such as Silencing the Nautch (2000), Imagining Jamuna (2000), Threads (2002) etc.).
• We draw on global and local processes that shape social issues in south Asia and the diaspora community here.
• Through our dance-works, we strive for sustainable and pluralistic communities that can acknowledge and bridge difference. 

Dance is integral to a community’s cultural experience and expression. I have a special responsibility as a dancer/choreographer and an ethnographer to make dance relevant to our lived experiences.  Working with Indian dance forms that have deep roots in tradition, I am interested in molding tradition to engage the contemporary.  By using idioms of tradition, we embrace themes of modernity.  Tradition and contemporary are thus not oppositional but are best understood as legacies, connections and transformations.  The dance-works of Courtyard Dancers similarly strive to diffuse binaries of east and west, tradition and modern, and mind and body, without losing cultural specificity. 

Pallabi, Komal, Naina, Anjali and Diditi in a scene from Imagining Jamuna.

Chandan Patra from Calcutta, tabla player on the recordings.

Sidhu Bhowmik from Calcutta, lead vocalist on the recordings.

Dan Scholnick, tabla player, guitarist, production manager. Dan is also a sound designer based in Philadelphia. He trained with Lenny Seidman of Philly, before training in Music at Wesleyan University. He went on to study on a Fulbright Fellowship in Mumbai, India, under Pandit Arvind Mulgaonkar. Dan is also co-founder and producer of Kaibutsu, a site-specific theater ensemble.

Diditi Mitra earned her doctoral degree in Sociology from Temple University. Currently, she teaches at Brookdale Community College in Lincroft, New Jersey. Diditi started learning Kathak in Kolkata at a very young age. She continued with her training in the United States with Janaki Patrik. Presently, she is learning Kathak from Pallabi Chakrovorty and Satya Narayan Charka.