Performing and Visual Arts

Kathyayini Dash is a multi-disciplinary performance practitioner and research scholar. Her performance practice is located within the field of Theatre and Performance Studies and her work derives from a wide range of visual art and musical practices. She is currently a doctoral scholar at the Centre for Theatre Dance and Performance Studies, University of Cape Town, South Africa and a contributing research scholar for an international multi-university research project, the Re-Centering Afro-Asia Project. Her research interests and work experience lie largely in areas of inter and multi-disciplinary artistic research, practice-as-research and practice-based research methodology in theatre and performance, in conjunction with the archive, theories of embodiment, decolonial studies, cultural studies and affect studies. She has collaborated in the creation of and performed in multiple collaborative trans-continental theatre productions at various venues across South Africa, Turkey and India. She has participated in several art exhibitions, most recently at the Mardin Biennale 5, Turkey (2022).

She is currently a doctoral scholar at the Centre for Theatre Dance and Performance Studies, University of Cape Town, South Africa. Her thesis seeks to map out infrastructures of affect by tapping into a rich afro-eur-asian musical landscape via a multi-disciplinary methodology that integrates methods from performance and visual art practice and draws upon theoretical frameworks from cultural studies and affect studies.

She is a contributing research scholar working within the Music and Migration division of an international multi-university research project called the Re-Centering Afro-Asia Project. Re-centring AfroAsia is a multi-pronged research, mapping, and archiving project supported by The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation that is currently in its second phase housed at the University of Witwatersrand and involving tertiary institutions in India, Mozambique, Ethiopia, Tanzania, Egypt and Morocco.

(forthcoming) READING AFRICA IN THE WORLD AND THE WORLD IN AFRICA, REFLECTIONS BOOK SERIES, EDITED BY FAISAL GARBA AND ARI SITAS Chapter Title: Musical Entrances into Historiography: The Matter of Music

(forthcoming) AFRO-ASIAN MUSICAL IMAGINARIES: INTERCONNECTED HISTORIES ACROSS CONTINENTS, INDIA INTERNATIONAL CENTRE QUARTERLY Paper title: The Body-in-Music: Musical Entrances into Historiography

(published) ARTISTIC RESEARCH IN AFRICA 2020: HOW DOES ARTISTIC RESEARCH DECOLONISE KNOWLEDGE AND PRACTICE IN AFRICA? CONFERENCE PROCEEDINGS Paper Title: Unpacking the Figure of the Artist Fieldworker