Dance@Bennington presents Dance in the Round

OPEN TO THE PUBLIC | Parijat Desai (Visiting Faculty in Dance) invites students, faculty, and staff for a session of Dance In The Round! No dance experience necessary!  Parijat is an NYC-based dance maker and educator. Through Dance In The Round, she shares her approach to communal dance practices from Gujarat, India where her family originates. With students from her Movement Practice class ("Orbiting Self and Community"), Parijat will guide us in garba, a circle dance played during Navratri, an autumnal festival featuring 9 nights of community dancing. She welcomes people of all ages and abilities.

Drawn to dance as an interdisciplinary medium, Parijat Desai has been creating hybrids of contemporary dance, Indian dance, and experimental theater since 2000. Most recently she choreographed the off-Broadway play Elyria at the Atlantic Theater. A Lester Horton Award–winning dance maker and educator, Parijat also facilitates Dance In The Round, sharing circle dances from Gujarat, India, reframing them to be inclusive across age, ability, gender, and caste and to support community activation. Concerned with the constant play between our emotional landscape, political realities, and the natural world, Parijat has been developing How Do I Become WE, a participatory performance ritual via residencies with Gibney Dance Center, BRICArts, and Soham Dance Space (Chicago). She was an Artist-in-Residence with Movement Research, CUNY Dance Initiative, Tribeca Performing Arts Center, and Stanford University's Institute for Diversity in the Arts. She has received commissions from Danspace Project, Harlem Stage, Grand Performances/LA, and NY State Council on the Arts. Parijat lives and works on the unceded lands of the Lenape peoples, New York City. BA Anthropology (Stanford U.); MFA Choreography (UCLA)