For the past nine months or so, I have been working on imagining and creating a dance show. That makes it sound like a dream—I’m making the show this summer, and it reimagines what a transitional Odissi Indian classical dance recital could look like through an anti-genre, progressive, queer lens.
“Wow, you’re such a Wesleyan student, Akhil.” Yes, and?
Over break, I began to choreograph this show with dancers for the first time. January was defined by long hours in rehearsal and longer hours on walks listening to the score—as well as fear and horror at the state of America and its politics. But as disdain with Trumpism and frantic creativity coexisted, they began to inform each other. Allow me to explain.
“Manchapravesh,” my show, reimagines six iconic, canonical Odissi pieces through contemporary movement and thematic intervention. What if the sensuality erased from Indian classical aesthetics was returned to its grammar? What if queer stories ignored in recent history was returned to the canon? What if female characters who were never given a voice had a chance to speak? What if the hierarchy of genre and caste that places “classical” dance above all else was destroyed? In my imagination at least, the show offers an alternative version of Odissi dance that has, to my knowledge, not been imagined before.
And to me, this itself is the show’s thesis statement. It emphasizes the existence and possibility of an alternative to hegemony, emphasizing that the ways in which we now know the world do not need to be the ways in which we will always know the world. Odissi is highly codified, with a heavily regulated canon, aesthetic, and pedagogy. Collective judgment is the police in this case, filtered through the mouths of the “Odissi fraternity,” the exclusive inner-circle of the form. I learned Odissi intensively for 12 years and have been practicing the form for 17 years—part of the reason I stopped training intensively with some of the form’s leading teachers was because of the ways in which queerness, difference, and experimentation were erased and shunned in the name of “purity.”
Genre, too, became a means of policing the form’s purity in my body—my contemporary dance training was the root cause of all my mistakes, according to my teacher, and was undermining the purity of our sacred dance style. And all of these policed aesthetics are filtered through a fabricated Hindu-fied history of the form, which erases the contributions of lower-caste hereditary dancers in order to link the dance to centuries of Hindu piety and purity. Odissi is a part of the Hindu nationalist project, the casteist project, the anti-queer project, and the conservative project. Preservation is the heartbeat of the form’s exponents.
“Manchapravesh” is my way of asking if there might be an alternative way of imagining Odissi outside the hegemonic understanding of it that we have today. If genre itself is a political project that enforces caste purity, sexual purity, and cultural aesthetic purity, how can we imagine Odissi free from the control of genre as a defining institution? What if Odissi was not bound to Hinduism or to India and its nationalism? Isn’t everything we accept as inherent a product of our own construction anyways?
As I dove deeper with this work in January, I began to find it everywhere. Scapegoating campaigns against drag queens and their art began to sound eerily similar to scapegoating campaigns against sexually “deviant” courtesans and their songs. Rewriting history books to erase Black history began to sound similar to the erasure of courtesan dance history by the academy. It felt like the world began to close in around me in similar ways to that of Odissi—only now at the national level in America. History was being rewritten, populations were being erased, stories were being silenced, and a new hegemony was beginning to emerge—one where so many possibilities were gone.
And so I went into the studio more and more and more. I felt helpless in the real world, but I saw agency in my work and the ability to use this project to talk about the present. Not necessarily literally—there was no Trump magically appearing in any of my pieces, nor anything explicitly talking about America—but rather, work that was initially just about the feeling of breaking free from the constraints of genre took on new meaning. How might it feel to be free from the dark cloud of the present moment? How might telling stories about queerness resisting erasure become even more meaningful or powerful in the present moment? How might this archaic show about deconstructing a random form of Indian dance really be an accidental allegory for America in 2025?
Resisting genre, resisting the academy’s judgment, and resisting classification is a form of aesthetic protest. By creating work that defies classification rules, I can undermine normative understandings of the world, its boxes, their separation, and their existence. Or, at least, it feels like that to me. Resisting new norms is everything right now, and resisting the tidal waves of scapegoating, bigotry, and apathy is hard. But through my work, I feel like I can practice, and can undermine these new norms in my own way.
Dancing and creating this work saved me from endless crashouts in January, and still does to this day. Am I filled with anxiety for the future? Of course. But does it finally feel like I have some way of processing that anxiety and talking about alternatives to doom? Definitely. The body carries a lot that the mind can’t understand, and processing the chaos of the world through movement feels necessary. At least for me.
As I look ahead to the future of the world with apprehension, I look ahead to the future of “Manchapravesh” and myself as a dancer with promise. My work this winter told me that dancing and creating choreography could give me hope for a better future. And if that isn’t a reason to keep creating, what is?
Akhil Joondeph is a member of the class of 2026 and can be reached at ajoondeph@wesleyan.edu.