How PECDA is showing up for contemporary dance

“What is happening here?” said one friend to another (unsurprisingly) during a moment of complete silence in the contemporary dance work being performed on stage. We were in the audience at the 7th edition of the Prakriti Excellence in Contemporary Dance Awards (PECDA), a biennial event that provides financial support, mentorship, and performance and networking opportunities through an open competition for contemporary dance practitioners.

This unfiltered audience member at the Bangalore International Centre auditorium wasn’t entirely to blame for their baffled query. The more one watches such live performances, the easier it is to understand abstract work.

India’s contemporary dance landscape is perennially in a dicey situation — lack of consistent funding, dwindling grants for creation and research, no institutional support (other than education and training), and hardly any critical writing around it. In this fragile ecosystem, being an opportunity that shows up consistently has been PECDA’s greatest win. Over the past 14 years and seven editions, it has stamped itself as the only publicly-available Rosetta Stone to understand the tangential explorations of our nation’s contemporary dance choreographers. It has also turned into an occasion to spend a weekend watching performances, attending workshops, and talking with dancers from all over India.

Performances at PECDA

Gateway to the world

The runway of opportunities provided by PECDA begins with its jury, a mix of national and international stakeholders. This year saw Saido Lehlouh, co-director of the Centre Chorégraphique National de Rennes et de Bretagne in France return, along with other key names from countries such as Australia, the U.K. and Thailand.

This committee was tasked with paring down the written proposals of 52 choreographers — the highest number of applicants till date — to 12 practitioners. The semi-finalists presented 10-minute excerpts of their dance works over two sessions, and then five finalists received individual sessions of feedback from the jury, had a day of mentoring with senior choreographers, and got rehearsal time to change up any technical factors of their presentations.

Physical intensity over pixel intrigue

Huddled in anticipatory darkness, we witnessed the works of the five finalists. While thematically, these choreographers took different paths, there seemed to be a marked return to playing with diverse dance vocabulary to polish a language of their own.

On a barely-lit stage, Pandurang Sagbhor slid and slithered across the stage in his work Body Oddy, his movement vocabulary powered by the sensuousness of Voguing (a dance form created by LGBTQ+ communities in Harlem that mimicked the poses of Vogue models, Egyptian hieroglyphics and acrobatic acts) and punctuated with the restrained yet frenetic movements that underline contemporary dance. His choreographic choice speaks to the dissonances in his experiences of gender and sexuality, domestic violence and societal constraints.

Pandurang Sagbhor’s Body Oddy

This thread was further tugged at in Deep Das’ Down To Earth. One could spot a whisper of Chau and Odissi that echoed the ludic play between Radha and Krishna. In moments of the body whirling, its movement seemed sourced from street-style dances — but here, it was rephrased and refreshed.

Deep Das’ Down To Earth

Abrar Saqib’s Saturn Is My Spine and Harini Meraki’s Tit For Tat were the most cinematic. Saqib’s work transported us into the red-glow of a cave haunted with a primal, guttural chorus of voices. It was like we had come upon a warrior’s ritual — a prayer that intercedes with the gods for strength and scaffolding against doom. Meraki’s choreography channelled an arachnid-like, female creature masked with a banana leaf taken over in a spiritual trance. Saqib and Meraki mirrored each other in that they were contemporary re-stagings of spiritual rituals.

Harini Meraki’s Tit For Tat 

Finally, Purnendra Kumar Meshram’s Where It All Began was a return to another trope of contemporary dance: restraint. Along a slash of light across an otherwise dark stage, Meshram’s body crumpled and collapsed into itself. It was meditative, restricting itself to a linear axis that contributed to this dance work feeling grounded.

Purnendra Kumar Meshram’s Where It All Began

Performances at PECDA

A visceral reminder

Live dance performances may not have the slick, edited feel of 90-second viral Reel dances. But they are most rewarding because contemporary dance speaks to the unquenchable humanness to explore and experiment. Here, the material is the body — something each one of us has. Perhaps, the way to watch it is to look out for these hints of history being retold and reformed.

So, ‘what is happening here’? A lot. It isn’t simply enough to want to be entertained, but to leave wondering: what burdens and joys do different bodies carry? Being an audience to contemporary dance means to seek and search; it is to allow yourself to be moved.

The writer and poet is based in Bengaluru.

Published – March 20, 2026 04:35 pm IST