What Flows Between Us: A Festival of India’s Classical Arts in Cross-Cultural Dialogue

92NY Harkness Dance Center announces What Flows Between Us: A Festival of India’s Classical Arts in Cross-Cultural Dialogue, a day-long immersion into the depth, rigor, and expansive imagination of the Indian classical arts. Curated by renowned kathak artist, choreographer, educator, and 92NY Artist in Residence Rachna Nivas, the festival gathers extraordinary women from North and South Indian classical music, dance, percussion, and poetry—artists whose lifelong devotion to mastery is matched by their thoughtful engagement with cross-genre collaboration. Vendor markets will be active throughout the day, offering traditional food and artisanal goods and the festival culminates with the New York premiere of SPEAK, a groundbreaking rhythmic conversation between kathak and American tap featuring Nivas, Fulbright scholar Rukhmani Mehta, MacArthur Fellow Michelle Dorrance, and tap legend Dormeshia.

The festival is presented as part of Women Move the World, 92NY’s 2025/26 Harkness Mainstage Series. For tickets and more information, visit https://www.92ny.org/event/what-flows-between-us. 

 

What Flows Between Us takes its name from the fluid intelligence of feminine energy — like water and rivers, it is expansive, adaptable, and shaped by the landscapes it moves through. While the festival brings together classical traditions from North and South India — forms with rigorously distinct movement languages, musical systems, and histories that are often misunderstood as one — it also illuminates the resonances they share with Western classical and jazz: rhythm, improvisation, poetry, devotion, and the embodied passing down of lineage.

But the festival also emphasizes that true cross-genre dialogue can only emerge from profound knowledge of one’s own form—a principle rooted in Nivas’s training under her guru Pandit Chitresh Das. Rather than “fusion,” these artists embody a shared ethos: maintain the integrity of their form while finding common ground, treating differences not as something to dilute or absorb, but as essential to a world where plurality thrives.