ARTISTIC DIRECTOR, NADHI THEKKEK.
Nadhi Thekkek is the Artistic Director of Nava Dance Theatre, a bharatanatyam dance company based in San Francisco, California (USA). She operates on the belief that bharatanatyam, while culturally-specific, is a modern medium with potential to push boundaries of how we can use traditional art forms to understand place, identity, and politics. Her Keralite Christian ancestry, hyphenated identities, experience as a child of immigrants and as a mother all shape her body of work. She reimagines how bharatanatyam can serve marginalized narratives that need to occupy space right now.
Nadhi’s work has been supported through:
New England Foundation for the Arts, National Dance Project
The MAP Fund
National Endowment for the Arts
California Arts Council
Zellerbach Community Arts Grants
Kenneth Rainin Foundation
San Francisco Arts Commission
CounterPulse Performing Diaspora
East Bay Community Foundation
Choreographers in Mentorship Exchange (CHIME) through Margaret Jenkins Dance Company.
Nadhi has performed at various venues; Scotiabank Dance Centre (Vancouver), La Mama Experimental Theatre Club (NYC), Dance Place (D.C.), and Southbank Center (London). She has also worked as freelancer with Seeta Patel (London), Randee Paufve (Oakland), Sujit Vaidya (Vancouver) and her work was recently commissioned by the Oakland Ballet Company.
Her latest work “Rogue Gestures/Foreign Bodies” is inspired by oral histories of women who immigrated to the US after the 1965 Immigration and Nationality Act. This inquiry sources community interviews, historical texts, and poetry to explore the intersections of labor, agency, and belonging in our South Asian ancestry. This work has earned Nadhi a nomination for an Isadora Duncan Award, for Best Direction and Choreography.
Her past production, “Broken Seeds Still Grow,” created and directed by Nadhi and visual artist Rupy C. Tut, was an exploration of their ancestry and an examination of cultural othering during the 1947 Partition, or the split between India and Pakistan (which created 15 million refugees and killed over 1 million people) and how that cultural othering continues to pervade in America today.
Nadhi’s body of work is inspired by witness statements, news media, and archival records from the South Asian American Digital Archive, Berkeley South Asian Radical History Walking Tour, and others. Her work examines what it means to belong somewhere, especially as a diasporic South Asian woman living in the Bay Area. Allowing these stories to occupy the space around us is an important part of Nadhi’s mission.
CURRENTLY TOURING.
“Rogue Gestures/Foreign Bodies” created and directed by Nadhi Thekkek, with music by Roopa Mahadevan and Kalaisan Kalaichelvan
“Broken Seeds Still Grow” co-created by Nadhi Thekkek and visual artist, Rupy C. Tut, with music by GS Rajan
“Unfiltered” co-produced and co-created by Nadhi Thekkek, Rasika Kumar, and Sahasra Sambamoorthi, with music by Roopa Mahadevan
TRAINING.
Nadhi Thekkek performed her arangetram (solo dance debut) in 2001, under the tutelage of Guru Smt. Sundara Swaminathan (Kala Vandana Dance Company, San Jose, CA) after more than 10 years of foundational training. During the next few years, she danced extensively with the company, performing in American venues such as the Palace of Fine Arts in the San Francisco Ethnic Dance Festival (2000 - 2002) and the Asian Arts Museum, as well as a number of company productions. Later, she had the opportunity to join Nritya School of Dance (Houston, TX) under the tutelage of Guru Smt. Padmini Chari. As of 2012, she has continued training under Guru Sri. A. Lakshmanaswamy (Chennai, India). Nadhi returns to Chennai 1-2x a year to continue with her training and to perform in multiple venues during the Chennai Music and Dance Festival.
Nadhi has earned her PhD in Bioengineering from Rice University under the guidance of MacArthur Genius Grant Fellow, Rebecca Richard-Kortum in 2013. (Nadhi's publications can be found here.) She finds many parallels between the research and discovery process both in science and in performing arts, in bharatanatyam especially. As a full-time dance maker and performer, she continues to apply the investigative process to the bharatanatyam work she creates today.
Banner photo by Sergio Carrasco
Portrait by Peter Prato
Rehearsal excerpts from “Restless Eyes Glance”
This particular piece is inspired by the breath of Krishna's flute, and the life it gives to those who hear it. Coming back to solo work, to traditional repertoire and in particular the varnam is what breathes life into the bharatanatyam practice.