Chitra Vairavan
Commissioned by the McKnight Foundation, Eiko choreographed a solo for Chitra Vairavan which she performed in the fall of 2018. Eiko created the solo by working collaboratively with an assumption that first create a duet, then let Chitra perform alone as a solo with invisible Eiko. Eiko invited Chitra to join her residency at Macalester College in the fall of 2019 to recreate the duet and performed it at the end of the residency. For this, they both interacted with the places important to them - Eiko with a projection of a train station in Fukushima and Chitra with a projection of train station in India where her parents met and Chitra frequented. They experimented with parallel solo-making as a duet.
Chitra Vairavan is a contemporary Indian dancer and choreographer of Tamil/South Indian-American descent. She is immersed in both Tamil culture and progressive brown politics in the U.S. She dances to heal and creates dance to help heal others. Her embodied practice and experimental process is rooted in deep listening, freedoms, poetry, vulnerability and ancestral memory.
Read:
Deep Listening: Creating from Memories and Speaking through Dance by Chitra Vairavan
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