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MIT and Harvard's Indian Performing Arts Organizations host
Inaugural National Dance Conference, Intersections
September 27 - 28, 2025 Boston, MA
- Anita Vallabh
e-mail: anitavallabhofficial@gmail.com

July 28, 2025

Intersections Conference 2025: Why the Indian Dance Conference Matters Now
Hosted by MITHAS and Lakshmi Mittal and Family South Asia Institute at Harvard University | Curated by Anubhava Dance Company

As an inaugural conference, Intersections: A Conference on Indian Classical Dance, approaches this fall, co-hosted by MIT Asian Dance Initiative (MITHAS) and the Lakshmi Mittal and Family South Asia Institute at Harvard University, we ask:

What does Indian dance mean today - especially for artists and audiences navigating diaspora, identity, and transformation?

This groundbreaking conference - the first of its kind - brings together over 35 leading artists, scholars, and creators from across the country for a multi-day gathering at MIT and Harvard. Through research talks, performances, and lecture-demonstrations, Intersections positions Indian classical dance not only as an artistic tradition, but as a vibrant and evolving platform for critical inquiry, innovation, and social relevance.

Intersections speaks to artists, educators, and researchers across disciplines, addressing urgent questions such as:
  • How do traditional dance forms evolve in new cultural contexts?
    • What happens when classical art migrates and takes root in diasporic spaces? How do dancers balance tradition, innovation, and hybridity?
  • What professional infrastructure do artists need to thrive?
    • How do we build systems - academic, archival, financial, and communal - that sustain artists beyond the stage?
  • How can we reframe classical dance as essential - not just cultural - but artistic, intellectual, and political?
    • How can movement function as scholarship, resistance, and transformation?
  • How is dance shaping diasporic identity, wellness, and community belonging?
    • What stories emerge when artists turn to classical idioms to explore queerness, memory, illness, and selfhood?

Intersections Conference 2025

Conference Tracks
The conference is organized around three thematic tracks that reflect these questions in research talks and presentations of new choreography:
  1. Foreign Lands, Foreign Experiences
    2. Stories of immigration, travel, and navigating new worlds through dance. How does movement carry memory, community, and transformation?
  2. Dancing the Archive, Feeling the Future
    3. Reimagining traditional repertoire in modern contexts. What does it mean to inherit and re-perform tradition in a rapidly changing world?
  3. Embodied Inquiry
    4. Exploring movement through research, critical questioning, and sensory experience - from injury prevention and pedagogy to rasa, biomechanics, and the haptics of dance.
Workshops and Development
In addition to artist showcases, participants will engage in workshops on grant writing, lighting design, and professional tools - equipping artists to succeed on their own terms.
Media partner Global Indian Artist™ will launch a platform in tandem with this landmark event to document, question, and amplify the conversations that Intersections opens up.

Expect coverage including:
  • Previews of talks, performances, and panels
  • Interviews with curators, artists, and scholars
  • Reflections on diaspora dance as both living tradition and critical practice
This is not just an event preview - it's an invitation to think together.

Join us at the crossroads of memory, movement, and meaning, as we imagine a future for Indian classical dance that is more connected, inclusive, and radically alive.

For press inquiries, media passes, or artist interviews, contact:
intersectionsdanceconference@gmail.com

Intersections Conference 2025

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