Community Engagement
Rachna Nivas offers a range of community engagement opportunities that deepen audiences’ connection to kathak as a living classical tradition, and to the cultural, rhythmical, and philosophical frameworks that shape her work. With over twenty-five years of experience as a performer, educator, and cultural leader, Nivas brings a practiced, thoughtful approach to engagement that integrates seamlessly into touring contexts and institutional partnerships. Her community-based work functions as an extension of her performance practice, creating meaningful points of access.
Each engagement can be tailored for universities, conservatories, dance departments, festivals, and community organizations.
Kathak Technique & Improvisation
A deep dive into Kathak’s rhythmic footwork, expressive gesture, and compositional play. Participants experience the balance between structure and spontaneity—between mathematical precision and emotional release.
Kathak & Live Music
A collaborative experience with live tabla and sitar, exploring the dynamic conversation between dancer and musician. Participants embody rhythm through listening, call-and-response, and rhythmic storytelling.
Complex Rhythms & Organic Math
Designed for percussionists, musicians, and rhythm enthusiasts, this workshop demystifies the intricate rhythmic systems of Indian classical music and dance. Through vocalization of bols, rhythmic recitation, and embodied counting cycles (tala), participants experience the architecture and improvisational logic of rhythm as living mathematics.
Workshops
The Hindu–Muslim Aesthetic of Kathak
Tracing Kathak’s syncretic evolution from Hindu temples to Mughal courts, this lec-dem illuminates how spirituality, poetry, and cultural fusion have shaped the form’s movement vocabulary, music, and storytelling.
The Body as Cosmos: Dance, Nature, and Consciousness
Adapted from Nivas’s NYPL Dance Research Fellowship presentation, this talk explores how Indian classical dance encodes ecological and cosmological ideas—revealing how movement can reflect natural cycles, sacred geometry, and our interconnectedness with the elements.
The Science of Rhythm and the Flowing Body
This lecture-demonstration investigates the biomechanics and neurophysiology of rhythmic movement. Nivas draws from Kathak’s intricate rhythmic structures to explore concepts of flow state, proprioception, and the body’s connective tissue network (fascia) as a conduit of vibration. Merging insights from kinesiological research, somatic awareness, and ancient rhythmic practice, the session reveals how repetitive cycles of sound and motion regulate the nervous system and expand consciousness.
Sound, Silence, and the Sacred: Vedic Philosophy in Movement
A talk-demonstration exploring how Kathak embodies core yogic and Vedic concepts such as Om (vibration), Shuniya (void), and Taal (cosmic rhythm). Participants experience how sound and silence, motion and stillness, form and formlessness interrelate within Indian aesthetics. Ideal for audiences interested in yoga, meditation, or Indian philosophy seeking to understand its embodied expression through dance.
Lecture Demonstrations
Rachna Nivas offers lectures and talks that draw from her decades of experience as a kathak artist, educator, and researcher, engaging audiences in the cultural, historical, and philosophical dimensions of Indian classical art.
Topics include:
The history of kathak and Indian classical dance within social, political, and postcolonial contexts
Tradition as a living force: maintaining rigor while allowing evolution in a changing world
Guru–shishya parampara (master–apprentice lineage) and mentorship in contemporary practice
The erasure, marginalization, and reclamation of women’s voices in Indian classical dance
The intersection of kinesiology, emotional intelligence, and spirituality in embodied practice
The history and influence of her lineage in the United States, often referred to as the “California Gharana”
Indian classical art as a pathway to interconnectedness, expanded perception, and higher consciousness
Nivas is also a former research fellow at the New York Public Library, where she presented the public research talk Nature, Woman, and the Macrocosm: How Indian classical dance transmits a consciousness of indivisibility, exploring the intersection of kathak with ecofeminism, interdependence, and kinship with nature and the cosmos. Her talks combine scholarly rigor with lived experience, making complex ideas accessible while honoring the depth of the tradition.
