About the Dancers

Shreya Srivastava is a third-year medical student at Albany Medical College in Albany, NY, and a board member of the Aseemkala Initiative. Prior to attending medical school, she majored in music at Union College and has trained in Bharatanatyam for over 18 years at the Natya Dharmi Foundation for Performing Arts in Michigan. She is interested in the intersection of performing arts and medicine, and how narrative medicine can be diversified with the inclusion of global art forms.

Imbalance

Dancers spend years trying to establish the required posture and structure for their dance forms. But with illness, such structure is difficult to maintain vestibular disorders, sensory disorders, chemotherapy, and many other disease or treatment processes can drastically weaken the body, making it difficult to achieve a sense of stability and strength. This performance explores the progression of a vestibular and sensory disease process in an individual that changes the way they interact with their everyday environment. The clear, structured form of Bharatanatyam that the dancer opens with slowly deteriorates into asymmetry and irregularity. But despite this change, the dancer still finds grace and meaning in what their body allows them to do.

Thursday, April 27, 6:30-8:30pm