The Southern Theater presents Ananya Dance Theatre’s Daak: Call to Action

(Minneapolis) Through the Odissi dance form, aesthetic traditions of Bengal and practices of street theater created by women’s groups, the women of Ananya Dance Theatre seek to reach and engage diverse peoples through their politically and socially charged work.  Artistic Director Ananya Chatterjea (City Pages’ “Best Choreographer 2007”) and her company follow last year’s sellout Southern show Pipaashaa: Extreme Thirst, with the second of a three-year, three-part series of evening-length works dedicated to environmental issues.  Daak: Call to Action was created in response to historic and continuing land rights violations happening across the world – from West Bengal, India, to the maquiladoras of Tijuana, Mexico, to Native communities here in Minnesota.

Performances of show are June 12th to the 15th, Thursday to Saturday, at 8 pm, and on Sunday at 7pm. There will be post-show discussions on Friday and Saturday nights. Tickets for the show are $19 (a $2 building preservation fee is added to each purchased ticket). The Southern Theater box office can be reached at 612.340.1725, and the theater is located at 1420 Washington Ave. S., Minneapolis, MN  55454.

Inspiration for the project was found within the testimonies of Native communities from Leech Lake and Lower Sioux Reservations, where women lead the Truth and Reconciliation Project, an effort to rewrite the history of Minnesota as the state proceeds with plans to celebrate its Sesquicentennial. This project works to create a place for the acknowledgment of the difficult parts of the state’s history, asking that ethnic cleansing, genocide and land appropriation issues do not go unaddressed.

The concept and choreography for the Daak was done by Ananya Chatterjea, and  the performance was directed by Dora Arreola. The score for the show is by Shubha Mudgal and Aneesh Pradhan, with the design by Rex Rajavairan.

Ananya Dance Theater began out of a desire to create a place for multiple generations of women of color to express both themselves and resonant issues through dance, which help the company to identify the building of community as an important objective. All women join as apprentices and go through a long and intense training process in Odissi, yoga and martial art forms as a strong foundation for their movement, while simultaneously participating in workshops focusing on antiviolence, community-building, anti-racism, and health and nutrition. The company operates under the belief that the search for excellence in artistry creates pathways to developing strong and active communities. With every project, ADT seeks to challenge widely-held assumptions regarding lack of artistic excellence in community-based artistic projects by consistently increasing the quality of their artistry, execution and production values. Diverse in age, race, nationality, sexual orientation, and profession, company members enrich the work with their understanding of what it means to be a woman of color moving, through artistic metaphors, towards peace and justice in the world today.

While the building of community is an extremely important function within the company itself, Ananya Dance Theater’s unique mission extends beyond and employs the goal of extending this supportive, explorative environment to the public through workshops and their performances. Daak in particular will end with a “call to action” to audiences, inviting them into awareness of the trauma suffered by communities endangered by environmental racism, as well as the innovative ways in which they can resist these phenomena. By asking audiences to identify with the presented cause, they are given the opportunity to become engaged with and a part of movements toward change.

The mission of Ananya Dance Theatre (formerly Women In Motion) is to stage original works inspired by the lives and work of women all around the world. Proactive in their desire to make their mission become a working reality, the company relies on a set of goals to keep them on the pathway to action. Daak operates within several of these goals, uniting women artists of color with international collaborators to create work where every woman feels valued.

ADT also maintains the specific goal of creating a safe space where issues that drive apart communities of color can be discussed and worked through using primarily artistic means. The perusal of this goal happens not only in the studio as the work is produced, but also within the performance space, as audiences are engaged in the issues and asked to take the information out with them and into new venues of discussion. Other goals include the unearthing and sharing the histories of women of color from different communities, to work collectively through the metaphors of movement towards a shared future of cooperation and alliance among communities of color and to project dance as a powerful way to articulate ideas and mobilize social change, all goals of which are being directly pursued as the company and audiences go along together on this journey.

Ananya Chatterjea (Artistic Director) is Associate Professor in the Dept. of Theater Arts and Dance and Director of Graduate Studies in the University of Minnesota, Minneapolis. She is also the Artistic Director of Ananya Dance Theatre, a dance company of women artists of color who believe in dancing to energize a future that is full of hope. Ananya believes in the integral interconnectedness of her creative and scholarly research and in the identity of her art and activism. Her book, Butting out! Reading cultural politics in the work of Chandralekha and Jawole Willa Jo Zollar, was published by Wesleyan University Press in 2004.  Ananya has recently performed in Osaka (Dance Box Festival), Jakarta (Indonesian Dance Festival), Kuala Lampur (Sutra Dance Theater) and Minneapolis (Southern Theater)