The IFA Archive Open House | A Conversation with Aishika Chakraborty and Preethi Athreya | Thursday, February 16, 2023
India Foundation for the Arts (IFA) and Indorama Charitable Trust
invite you to
The IFA Archive Open House
with Aishika Chakraborty and Preethi Athreya
in conversation with Biswadeep Chakraborty (Archivist, IFA)
Thursday, February 16, 2023 | 06:30 PM - 07:30 PM IST | Zoom and Facebook Live
How do dancers document their journeys while attempting to study bodily identity beyond its physiology? What methods do performers employ to archive a performance, which is ephemeral in nature? And how does a performer explore the history of contemporary dance to bring out that history’s nuances and non-linearities to create new languages for dance?
Join us to listen to grantees of IFA Aishika Chakraborty and Preethi Athreya, experts in contemporary dance, who will speak about contemporary dance history, what kind of stories and aesthetics are left out of conventional frameworks of dance, the specific challenges encountered during their projects, the kind of archival materials that were generated from their explorations, and possibilities of new work coming out of it. They will also be in conversation with Biswadeep Chakraborty, Archivist at IFA
Aishika Chakraborty is an Associate Professor at the School of Women’s Studies, Jadavpur University, Kolkata and is trained in Kathak and Bharatnatyam. She received a grant from IFA under the Arts Research programme to explore the history of contemporary dance in Bengal seen through the perspectives of two women dancers, Manjusri Chaki Sircar and Ranjabati Sircar. Read more about the project at the online archive:
Preethi Athreya is a Chennai-based contemporary dancer and choreographer trained in Bharatnatyam under the Dhananjayans. She received two grants from IFA under the New Performance and Arts Practice programmes. Both grants were towards creation of performances. The first one created a piece that interweaved dance, music, mime, and voice to discover the body through different perspectives, and the second sought to explore the body as a functional entity in contrast to its performative and productive being. Read more about the projects at the online archive:
Click here to register for the discussion on Zoom.
The discussion will also be streamed live on our Facebook page, for which no prior registration is required
Launched in 2018, The IFA Archive is a space that holds the diverse materials of the projects supported and implemented by IFA over the years, currently featuring materials from 420 projects online at https://www.theifaarchive.org/
The IFA Archive Open House is a series of conversations with artists and scholars around the materials deposited at the IFA Archive at the end of their projects.
The IFA Archive is built with support from Indorama Charitable Trust.