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. But practitioners are also resilient, responding to challenges with steely confidence.
At a time when institutionally-backed showcase platforms are disappearing, contemporary dance practitioners have been putting together their own tours. Bouncing between cities and small towns, they reconfigure their dance work to fit into temporary spaces. They also hold workshops, both as a means of knowledge-sharing and to help with their performance costs.
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
With each edition, they’ve built more offerings for contemporary dance practitioners and enthusiasts into the event. At the 2026 edition, they included “a speed mentoring session, where young choreographers — even outside of the competition could present their work to the award’s jury for feedback”, says Ranvir Shah, founder trustee of Chennai-based Prakriti Foundation and patron of this platform. “And now, we’ve made sure all of the shortlisted choreographers receive notes from the jury too. In this way, PECDA remains the same but also brings in changes.”
“The challenges with each edition of PECDA remain the same: finding the finances. With every edition, the running of the event itself is smoother because we’ve settled on our template but we still leave room to be flexible and respond to the needs of the contemporary dance community.”Ranvir ShahFounder trustee of Chennai-based Prakriti Foundation
Ranvir Shah
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. “Our rotating jury from India and around the world is configured to help these emerging choreographers connect and network with the contemporary dance landscape at large,” explains Shah.
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.
Winning boost
The PECDA winner receives ₹5 lakh to transform their excerpt into a full-length work, and a mentorship with choreographer Lehlouh at an international residency in France. Assistance is provided for the work to go on tour and a showcase guaranteed at the next edition of the awards.
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
Feeling of community
PECDA’s commitment to showing up has recharged the contemporary dance landscape. It has helped previous winners such as Manipur-based choreographer Surjit Nongmeikapam tour their work internationally, as well as coaxed Chattisgarh-based Pradeep Gupta “who doesn’t have an education in contemporary dance and no local support” to continue with his contemporary dance practice. “The prize money has helped me survive and invest in pursuing my personal research into creating movement because accessing grants is difficult for someone from a small-town who isn’t savvy in English and doesn’t understand the system,” Gupta explains. “And since being an awardee, I’ve been connected with a community of contemporary dance practitioners. I’ve travelled to them to learn and build my own movement language while working with dancers in my local context to make work.” PECDA has contributed to a feeling of community among the country’s contemporary dance practitioners and stakeholders, while steadily growing an inquisitive audience.
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? “We make contemporary dance because the body continues to be a way to engage with the world. And its critique in India is ‘this is too difficult for an audience’ or ‘it’s alienating the audience’,” says Anoushka Kurien, a Chennai-based contemporary dancer-choreographer.
“But this will always be a question that a contemporary dance practitioner will be forced to answer. And hopefully, each of us — dancers and choreographers — are thinking of our way to answer it. How far one goes in testing those relationships [between why you make what you make, who you make it with, and who make it for] — that’s really the experiment,” she adds.
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
