May 01 2026 to May 01 2026 6:30 p.m.

Where

Bangalore International Centre

7 4th Main Rd, Stage 2, Domlur 560071

Event Description

This event is secretly a pitch.

An invitation to draw you into the pleasure, pain, and politics of contemporary dance.

Diya Naidu and Priyabrat Panigrahi, long-time collaborators, arrive with a question they cannot stop asking: Why do we even bother? Why dance when no one is watching? This lecture demonstration is their attempt to convince you, and themselves!

The work moves through images, video, live dance, and conversation. It is devised and autobiographical, borrowing freely from cultures and artists across the world, as contemporary dance does. Chaotic by design, it is also structured: a multi-medium inquiry unfolding in thematic chapters, tracing the history, the obsessions, and the particular intelligence of the contemporary dancing body. You will be part of the experiential closing segment. 

At the centre of it all is a single, looming question: Can the dancing body be of service?

This event is a part of our programming to celebrate World Dance Day 2026, ‘The Many Lives of Dance’.

Facilitators

Priyabrata Panigrahi
Contemporary Dance Artist, Performer & Movement Educator
Priyabrata Panigrahi is a contemporary dance artist, performer, and movement educator based in Bangalore. He began his training at the Attakkalari Centre for Movement Arts and later received a scholarship to study at P.A.R.T.S Contemporary Dance School. He has since worked as a freelance artist and has been part of the Citizens of Stage since 2018. His 2021 choreographic work How Long Is Forever,  has been presented at multiple national and international festivals.

He has performed and toured widely with dance and theatre companies, including work with The Company Theatre and choreographers such as Diya Naidu and Abhilash Ningappa. Alongside performing, he has worked as a movement director for theatre productions and is currently a guest faculty at the Drama School Mumbai.

His practice explores efficient physicality and the visceral, communicative potential of the body, with a growing focus on developing movement vocabulary. His training integrates contemporary dance, qi-gong, and capoeira. He is one of India’s few certified Functional Range Conditioning teachers.

Diya Naidu
Performance Maker & Dancer
Diya Naidu is a Bangalore-based performance maker and dancer whose practice bridges contemporary dance, theatre, text, and conversation. Grounded in yoga, partner work, and embodied inquiry, she investigates longing, shame, patriarchy, and resistance, while opening the dancing body as a vessel for text and a site to dissolve binaries. She sees the artist as a site for integration in polarized times, exploring intimacy as a tool of resistance and proposing embodied ways of living.
A former repertory dancer with Attakkalari Centre for Movement Arts, Diya founded Citizens of Stage Co Lab, aimed at making dance sustainable, and is a member of East African Soul Train (EAST), a transnational collective committed to decolonial practice. She has collaborated internationally, including with Australian artist Nadia Milford, Swiss choreographers Nicole Seiler and Cie Gilles Jobin, and theatre ensembles such as The Company Theatre, Mumbai. She has choreographed projects critiquing caste, class, and patriarchal structures, including KAVAN and Be-Loved. She performedin Ef_Feminity, an dance documentary on Gender Fluidity by Chris Leuenberger Productions.

Her works, Ceremony of Longing, Red Dress Waali Ladki, Suraiya is a Country, The Ocean Between Us, among others, have toured nationally and internationally and she has been supported by awards such as the Robert Bosch Young Choreographer’s Award, Pro Helvetia Co-Creation Grant, The Maitri Grant Australia, and the Deccan Herald Changemakers Award.

Looking forward, Diya is expanding her practice to collaborations between dance, ecological action, and intergenerational knowledge, especially the nuanced perspectives of elders. Her ongoing work aims to envision possibilities beyond capitalism, patriarchy, colonialism, and heteronormativity, holding space for critical, vulnerable, and transformative encounters with the body. She is deeply interested in Propositions for Rest in the hyper-stimulating environment of social media, urban chaos and ecopolitical breakdown.