Nava Dance Theatre turns real-life stories into mythical-style bharatanatyam

Nava’s latest work, “Rogue Gestures/Foreign Bodies,” is inspired by Thekkek’s mother, who moved to the U.S. as an unmarried nurse in 1978, and remained working even after agreeing to an arranged marriage and having children. Thekkek traces this story back to the 1965 Immigration Act, which ended many racially discriminatory practices and opened an era of Indian immigration — including Indian women who came alone to work jobs in health care.

Thekkek spoke to The Chronicle from her home in Alamo about “Rogue Gestures/Foreign Bodies,” which features music from frequent collaborator Roopa Mahadevan and Toronto film score composer Kalaisan Kalaichelvan, before its debut Friday, Dec. 9, at ODC Theater.

Q: How does the contemporary movement come in?

As for the movement being “rogue,” I trust in my body. I call it memory mining, where I take a prompt or a story and connect it to my own experience, or in this case the experience of the elders in my family, and I trust that the movement that comes out of it embodies that story. So (in the show) we have a movement that looks sort of like bharatanatyam in this traditional storytelling way, but we’re telling very different stories. And then we have this movement that looks very experimental, and when people ask, “What are you dancing? What’s the form?” I’m like, “I don’t know.” Our bharatanatyam bodies have been trained a certain way to do technical movements, and the dancers in the company are extremely high-capacity dancers, but I’m asking them to push a little further, saying, “What does this mean to you?”