Kaustavi Sarkar, studied at Ohio State University and is now Assistant Professor in the Department of Dance at UNC Charlotte. She is an Indian dance-scholar and dance-artist presenting her scholarly and creative works on the global stage. She is the Artistic Director of Kaustavi Movement Center, an India based organization for transnational dissemination of Odissi from feminist, queer, and critical lenses.
In a series of blog posts developed as part of her studies, she excavates her Odissi practice to trace the historical remnants of Mahari ritual practice. She documents her work improvising using the structured Creative Articulations Process (CAP), proposed by dance-scholar Vida Midgelow and Jane Bacon, in order to find the embodied traces of traditional Mahari praxis within the Odissi repertory. Using CAP, she emphasizes and accentuates these transmissions of temple-dancing in her body. This blog is an imbrication of theoretical, technological, and practical inspirations that undergird her discovery of Mahari in her dancing body, via CAP.
CAP Session I | Deconstructing Odissi: Methods
She has also published this work in the Choreographic Practices Journal: ‘De-centring the choreographer: Historically inspired interruptions/disruptions in an exploration between sculpture and movement’ Volume 10, Number 2, 1 December 2019, pp. 269-291(23)