Wednesday
08
October 2025
3:00 - 4:30 PM IST
Location
Room 314, Patrick French Black Box
School of Arts and Sciences
Central Campus
Share
Abhinaya: The Art of “Seeing”, not Showing
Arts and Sciences Research Seminar Series
Navtej Singh Johar
Dancer- Choreographer
Scholar, Yoga Exponent, Social Activist
Speaker
Navtej Johar will discuss the idea of practice, or abhyasa, in this presentation. Questioning the popular pedagogies that view embodied practice as extended exercises in “doing”, “mastering,” or “perfecting”, Johar proposes practice to necessarily be an exercise in becoming available, i.e., becoming available to the layers of suggestion within a word, image, texture, shade, cadence, and so on. Therefore, he will discuss the critical role of “seeing” the multitudeness of the poetic object, as well as remaining available to sensorially reciprocate the shifting shades of what is seen. At the heart of Johar’s understanding of abhyasa is the license of autonomy to willfully configure poetic imagery in order to strike resonance between self and poetic object.
Speaker
Navtej Singh Johar
Navtej Singh Johar is a dancer-choreographer, scholar, yoga exponent, and a social activist. A recipient of the Sangeet Natak Akademi award for Contemporary Choreography (2014), his work—within all fields of his varied interests—remains consistently body-centric. It twines practice with critical theory and social action, traverses freely between the traditional and the contemporary, and rigorously engages both the philosophical and the political discourses of the body. Founder-director of Studio Abhyas, New Delhi, he also teaches Dance Studies at Ashoka University, Sonipat.
