The South Asia Institute of Columbia University Hosts Tongues Untied Panel 4/23

The South Asia Institute of Columbia University & Engendered Dance Festival present Tongues Untied (The Panel): Desire, Gender, Power and Performance in SA

Date:TODAY Friday, April 23, 2010
When: 7:00 pm to 8:30 pm with reception to follow
Where: South Asia Institute, Knox Hall, 606 W. 122nd Street, Room 208
Free & Open to public,
RSVP required to admin@engendered.org, 917-971-8722
Panelists: Swati Bhisé, Uttara Coorlawala, Mario D'Penha, Gayatri Gopinath and Tehreema Mitha,
Omar Rahim
Moderator: Myna Mukherjee

Challenging biological understandings of the body, gender and sexuality, this panel will explore the complex relationships between power and performance in historical and contemporary South Asia. What are the different ways in which desire and gender have been performed in South Asia? What relationships do such performances have with structures of power, as well as ritual and religious
practices in South Asia? What are the visual codes through which desire, longing, intimacy and sexuality have been enacted and understood? How do artists continue to negotiate and refigure the themes, forms and languages of their practice within repressive or changing circumstances? And how do audiences bring their senses into dialogue with artists and performers? In inviting these queries, this panel will survey a brief history of the place of gender, gender crossings and fluid sexualities in South Asian performance. It will suggest how these distinctive practices around gender and sexuality engage in conversations across cultures, within tolerant, multicultural and cosmopolitan politics. In addition, it will also show how such practices may be implicated within and
challenge historical and contemporary, colonial and neo-colonial structures of power.

About:
Gayatri Gopinath is an Associate Professor of Gender and Sexuality Studies in the Department of Social and Cultural Analysis at New York University. Her work in queer studies, popular culture and the South Asian Diaspora has appeared in numerous articles and anthologies, most recently in the Blackwell Companion to LGBT Studies. She is the author of Impossible Desires: Queer Diasporas and
South Asian Public Cultures(Duke UP, 2005).

Uttara Coorlawala has been teaching technique and theoretical dance courses at Barnard College (Columbia University), Long Island University's C.W. Post Campus, and at Princeton. She recently received the Dadabhai Naoroji Lifetime Achievement Award sponsored jointly by the British and Indian governments and most recently has been researching South Asian Dance for an Asia Society/Ford Foundation project on changing demographies and cultures in the U.S.

Swati Bhisé received her Masters of Fine Arts at the Center for Indian Classical dance, and became a Representative and Cultural Ambassador, honored by the Indian Government. In addition to being a long time Symphony Space teaching artist, she has lectured and performed at Columbia University, NYU, and University of Texas in Austin, the American Museum of Natural History, The Smithsonian and the Metropolitan Museum of Art.

Mario D'Penha was educated at St. Xavier's College and Jawaharlal Nehru University in India and is currently pursuing his Ph.D. in History at Rutgers University, New Jersey. He is a queer feminist activist and is part of Nigah, a queer collective that uses film and the arts to incite discussions on sexuality in India.

Tehreema Mitha is a choreographer and dancer from Pakistan who was trained in the classical style of an Indian dance called Bharatanatyam by her mother and Guru, Indu Mitha, who was as much a political figure as a dancer. She was recently commissioned to perform at the Millennium Stage of the Kennedy Center, and The Washington Post raves that Mitha, "crosses borders as easily as the rest of us cross streets."

Omar Rahim an alumnus of MacArthur Award-winning Susan Marshall and Company, performed internationally at venues including the Brooklyn Academy of Music, Jacob's Pillow, the Joyce Theatre in New York and the Edinburgh Festival. While an undergrad at Wesleyan University, Rahim wrote an honors thesis on the intersection of art and activism in the work of iconoclastic Indian choreographer Chandralekha. His choreography has been presented at Dance Theater Workshop in New York, NY, at Wesleyan University and at the Bates Dance Festival in Lewiston, Maine. Omar has choreographed dances for the prestigious stage and television Lux Style Awards shows in Karachi, Pakistan in 2002, 2003, and 2006. In 2008, Omar choreographed and featured in Saqib Malik's acclaimed music video for Pakistani girl band Zeb and Haniya's Aitebar track and choreographed Bossy R, a music video for Sesame Workshop in New York with five-time Emmy-nominated Director Koyalee Chanda. Omar recently wrapped his first starring role in a South Asian feature film shot in Bangladesh called Meherjaan which co-stars Indian cinema legends Jaya Bachchan and Victor Banerjee.

Myna Mukherjee is the Founder/Artistic Director of Engendered, a New York non-profit, trans-national arts and human rights organization focused on presenting issues of gender and sexuality in the South Asian Diaspora through performance, music, visual art, and film. Mukherjee also serves as the Director/Choreographer for the critically-acclaimed Nayikas, New York's first resident, feminist, classical Odissi dance theater company.

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