In this course, the contemporary dancer Padmini Chettur will present her decades-long oeuvre over eight sessions, interrogating the relation between the body, movement, and language. 

A pedagogy that combines writing, viewing, listening, and discussion, each class will consider two of her works with rigor. We’ll ask: what is the relation between dance and research? Why dance? Is the aesthetic a choice or necessity, a flourish on the supposedly more serious business of politics, science, and everyday life or fundamental to developing a truly political science and way of being? Is dance linguistic or bodily, speech or silence, text or movement, or does the dancerly medium transcend these oppositions? How so? What does it mean to move and speak in the East vs. the West, if anything?

A genuine thinker, a true pedagogue, a disciplined dancer, Padmini Chettur addresses these questions.