The Ensemble's most recent production WE SINFUL WOMEN dramatizes Pakistani Urdu feminist poetry as the life of the universal woman, filled with ecstatic joy and searing protest. Each contemporary comment was followed by a similar situation in a classical Kathak dance. For example its PREMIKA framed the ashta nayika (eight heroines, eight moods of love) convention with the outspoken musings by a modern Indian woman about her love life. Rather than giving lecture-demonstrations, the Ensemble creates performance structures which reveal Indian dramatic and pictorial conventions. Contemporary music by John Adams and David Lang has accompanied extensions of the Kathak movement vocabulary. Exploring similar structures in Hindustani and western music, the Ensemble has choreographed movement-music conversations between Kathak and its accompanying Hindustani music, aincluding jazz scatting and Kathak bol parhant. The Ensemble has unraveled pan-Indian poetry for its American audiences, interweaving English translations with verses in their original Sanskrit, Hindi, Urdu, Bengali and Braj languages, accompanied by music commissioned from a broad spectrum of Indian, American and Sri Lankan composers. Showcasing both classical Lucknow- gharana Kathak and original choreography, the Ensemble's works have been inspired by texts as diverse as the Rig Vedic Hymn of Creation, X.129 and modern poet W.H. The Kathak Ensemble & Friends' Mission is "to engage in a dialogue with familiar American arts forms, demystifying unique details of pan-Indian culture and engaging audience members in a journey of the imagination, revealing exotic other-ness as a variation on the common theme of human-ness."įounded in 1978, the Kathak Ensemble has presented over 30 full-evening productions for both group and solo formats, as well as many shorter works.
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