Learning to Walk Like Radha (2011)

A talking dancer negotiates a really long piece of cloth while humorously commenting on the conflicts she experienced as a Taiwanese-American feminist learning classical kathak in Calcutta. Faced with the requirement to perform gender – to walk like Radha – in ways that she cannot quite grasp or agree with, she finds herself torn between competing impulses to act as obedient disciple, earnest anthropologist, and stubborn feminist.

improvised choreography and performance: Cynthia Ling Lee
inspired by Simone Forti’s text-movement improvisation structures
traditional kathak compositions learned from Bandana Sen