Premiered during the pandemic, Moraga re-explores Mantram, which celebrates the combination of creative innovation and tradition in North Indian classical kathak dance and North Indian classical music while probing our connections to each other and our planet. Also on this program the Chitresh Das Institute’s Youth Company will perform an invocation.

Mantram is an experimental piece that departs from the traditional storytelling subject matter of kathak dance.  Through the concepts of the pancha bhuta, or five elements, Mantram utilizes rhythmic footwork, music, expression, and the lyrical and architectural movement of kathak dance to explore how we have become so disconnected from one another and from the planet that is literally burning up around us. How, despite our bodies pulsating the rhythms of the world around us, have we become so disconnected?