In the second episode of Off Season Chats, Ameya and Kiran speak with Kaustavi Sarkar, an Odissi dancer, researcher, and educator based in Charlotte, North Carolina. She shares her artistic and academic journey, bridging research and practice, decolonizing dance and academia, and building a South Asian dance consortium.

Off Season Chats is a new series in which we have intimate conversations with dancers who are forging new paths in their artistic, personal, and professional lives. Our special guests are accomplished artists whose works span across many genres of South Asian dance including: Kathak, Kandyan, Kuchipudi, Bharatanatyam, Manipuri, Odissi, and much more.

About Kaustavi Sarkar:

Dr. Kaustavi Sarkar is an Assistant Professor of Dance at the University of North Carolina, Charlotte. Her research interests include Practice-as-Research, religious studies, digital humanities, choreographic research, and queer theory. She is a 2020 National Endowment for the Arts recipient and Artistic Director of Kaustavi Movement Center. Her choreography and scholarship have been featured in American College Dance Association Conference, Dance Studies Association, World Dance Alliance, and Odissi International.

These aspects of her practice also appear in her forthcoming book project, Shaping S-Curves (University of North Carolina Press). She will also be releasing a monograph, Dance, Technology, Social Justice, which presents a critical cultural take on dance technique as a technology of social justice. She recently presented a new piece, The Impossible Romance, with choreographer Maya Kulkarni.

Instagram: @kaustavisarkar

Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/kaustavi.sarkar

Dive Deeper:

• Brenda Dixon Gottschild - Digging the Africanist Presence in American Performance
• Ashanti Brantley - "Have Arts, will travel"
• Constance Valis Hill - "From Bharata Natyam to Bop: Jack Cole's 'Modern' Jazz Dance"

Today’s episode of Off Season Chats would not have been possible without the support and encouragement of our amazing listeners and the following people:  

• We Edit Podcasts for audio engineering   
• Sangeetha Kowsik for graphic design of our logo  
• Wesley Beeks & Bertel King, Jr.  

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Off Season Chats is an Off The Beat production