05/06/2026
Lecture Workshop by Sumedha Bhattacharyya
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Wednesday, 10 June 2026
14:00, SR 150 (Reiterkaserne)
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GLIDING HISTORIES : Meend and the Choreomusical Memory of Kathak
Gliding Histories explores the concept of meend — the glide between notes in Hindustani music— as a framework for thinking through the oral musical memory of Kathak and its layered histories of sound, movement, and transmission. Meend in Kathak is also transition between two motifs.
Drawing from ethnomusicology, choreomusicology, embodied practice, and personal archival inquiry, this lecture-workshop examines how movement and music carry traces of continuity, silence, erasure, and inheritance within the form.
Situating Kathak within its interconnected histories of court performance, hereditary lineages, and the often-overlooked contributions of “tawaif” cultures, the session approaches the dance form as a living archive shaped through oral transmission, repetition, musicality, and embodied memory.
Central to the workshop is the figure of the courtesan woman embodying the interconnected artistic practice of poetry, music, gesture, rhythm, and dance existed not as separate disciplines, but as intertwined modes of knowledge-making and performance.
As a trained Kathak dancer working through intergenerational learning, the lecture workshop reflects on how dancers inherit histories through the body, often without direct access to the absences and silences embedded within national narratives. How do sound and movement remember what archives omit?
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📸 Sumedha Bhattacharyya
Kunstuni Graz KUG
