Artist-in-Residence:
Parijat Desai

Soham Dance Space celebrates our inaugural Artist-in-Residence Parijat Desai.

Soham Dance Space is honored to partner with Parijat Desai as we pilot an Artist-in-Residence program that uplifts, complicates, and reframes South Asian dance in the diaspora. This program will celebrate one experimental artist of the South Asian diaspora, support deep engagement with the resident artist throughout the year, and co-produce public programs that showcase the artist’s work. This initiative emerged from reflections on the absence of producers and presenters who are able to appreciate the wide range of aesthetics and motivations of South Asian American dance artists. Too often, artists face a degree of tokenization, a shallow, over-simplified engagement with their work, or an inability to foreground personal, idiosyncratic relationships with form and identity. We hope that this program disrupts prevalent paradigms and spotlights the multiplicity of our contemporary practices. 

Parijat Desai, Artistic Director of Parijata Dance Company based in New York, creates and performs a blend of contemporary, Indian classical, Gujarati folk and other movement forms to express a South Asian American, immigrant identity and to challenge nationalism, xenophobia, and fundamentalism. Parijat also leads Dance In The Round, sharing garba and raas movement as a vehicle for supporting community healing, engagement, and activation. She holds a BA in anthropology from Stanford University, and an MFA in choreography from UCLA.

As Parijat marks the 21st anniversary of her company, we are excited about the possibilities of producing a series of events examining garba, healing, caste, and nationalism.