Broken Seeds Still Grow
“Born out of a collaboration between Nadhi, a dancer, and Rupy a visual artist, and a shared passion for telling our stories – Broken Seeds Still Grow, is a symphony of dance, paintings, music, calligraphy, music, song, prose and poetry. Rupy’s empathetic narration is accompanied by her stunning visuals, which provide the perfect context to the mesmerizing and energetic dance performances by Nadhi and her team.”
“...a meditation...on Partition and its relationship to the immigrant experience...”
Mondavi Arts Center Presents
BROKEN SEEDS STILL GROW
March 14 & 15, 2025 at 7:30 PM
at Vanderhoef Studio Theatre 1 Shields Ave, Davis, CA 95616
For more info and press kit, visit brokenseeds.com.
Nadhi Thekkek (Artistic Director, Nava Dance Theatre) and visual artist Rupy C. Tut (Art by Rupy, Oakland, CA) create Broken Seeds Still Grow, a multi-disciplinary dance theatre production exploring the continuing impact of the 1947 British India Partition. Through bharatanatyam dance and mixed visual media, they examine the hyphenated-American, immigrant experience, linking it to the displacement of their ancestors during Partition. This creative inquiry sources poetry, eyewitness accounts, and current events to understand the current political climate while reflecting on what it means to belong somewhere.
Partition was one of the most formative events in South Asia's recent history, creating over 15 million refugees and leaving over one million people dead. Nadhi and Rupy have sourced eyewitness accounts from Partition collected by collaborating organization, the 1947 Partition Archive (Berkeley, CA) and researched the current South Asian immigrant experience to understand how the feeling of displacement continues to shape identities today. Nadhi and Rupy use bharatanatyam, calligraphy, indian miniature painting, and spoken word to tie these contemporary narratives to their personal experiences as Americans of South Asian descent.
Broken Seeds Still Grow premiered November 16-19, 2017 in Oakland, CA at The Flight Deck and was produced by Nava Dance Theatre.
The creation of this work was supported by the East Bay Fund for Artists through the East Bay Community Foundation, Zellerbach Family Foundation, William and Flora Hewlett Foundation, Dancers' Group CA$H Grants, and crowd funders. This project is fiscally-sponsored by CounterPulse. The premiere of this work was co-presented by South Asian American Digital Archive (SAADA), South Asian Americans, Leading Together (SAALT), Berkeley South Asian Radical Walking Tour, Pioneering Punjabis Digital Archive (UC Davis, MESA), Jakara Movement.
Past Shows:
The Flight Deck, Oakland (2017)
ACT, San Francisco (2018)
Asian Art Museum (excerpts) at Kearney Street Arts Festival (2018)
CounterPulse, San Francisco (2019)
Rotunda Dance Series by World Arts West and Dancers' Group, San Francisco (2019)
Lecture Demonstrations, UC Riverside (2020)
Bankhead Summer Series, Livermore (2022)
Show
Runtime: 70 minutes
Performed with live music
Credits
Creators/Directors: Nadhi Thekkek and Rupy C. Tut
Choreography: Nadhi Thekkek
Indian Miniature Painting/Calligraphy/Animation: Rupy C. Tut
Music Composition/Orchestration/Flautist: G. S. Rajan
Visual Art Projection: Wolfgang Wachalovsky
Dancer Collaborators: Nadhi Thekkek, Shruti Abhishek, Lalli Venkat, Janani Muthaiya, Aishwarya Subramaniam, Vertika Srivastava, Shelley Garg
Musician Collaborators: Sindhu Natarajan (vocal), Srivathsa Pasumarthi (flute), Umesh Venkatesan (nattuvangam), Aditya Iswara (percussion), Matt Small (Bass)
Lighting Design: Richard Board
Production Manager: Purna Venugopalan
Past Collaborators: Darl Andrew Packard, Manasa Suresh, Akshaya Ganesh, Rohan Krishnamoorthy, Michelle Ruttiman, Chris Evans, Nitya Narsimhan, Kavita Venkateswar
Funding: California Arts Council - Cultural Pathways, East Bay Community Foundation, Zellerbach Family Foundation, Dancers’ Group CA$H Grants, City of Oakland's Cultural Funding Program, ACT Artshare Residency, CounterPulse House Artist and Co-Production Programs