Cynthia Ling Lee

1. Kolkata, India. 15-19 August 2010. Cynthia co-teaches contact improvisation workshops.

Cynthia Lee and Shyamala Moorty will teach a contact improvisation workshop series entitled "Moving Into Trust" as part of DISHA, an international conference on dance and empowerment organized by World Dance Alliance-West Bengal. These 3 hour workshops will take place in the afternoons at the Jain House in the Esplanade East area of Kolkata.

To register or for more information, please contact Suman (98300 19635) or Munia (98301 65286).

2. Kolkata, India. 20 August 2010. Cynthia performs in DISHA, an international conference on dance and empowerment organized by World Dance Alliance West Bengal.

DISHA, an international conference on dance and empowerment, will be inaugurated by a performance on 20 August at 6:30 pm at the Rabindranath Tagore Centre, ICCR featuring the choreography of Sandra Chatterjee, Cynthia Lee, and Shyamala Moorty of the Post Natyam Collective and Taiwanese choreographer Chieh-Hua Hsieh. The conference will take place from 20-22 August at Max Mueller Bhavan and will feature paper presentations, panel discussions, lecture-demonstrations, and film showings from local and international artists, scholars, and culture-workers. DISHA is organized by the World Dance Alliance, West Bengal Chapter.

For more information, please contact Suman (98300 19635) or Munia (98301 65286).

Cynthia will be an artist-in-residence at the Taipei Artists Village in Taipei, where she will be collaborating with new music/jazz composer and pianist, David Cutler, of Pittsburgh. Their collaboration will culminate in an evening-length show at the Kuandu Arts Festival.

4. Taipei, Taiwan. 22-23 October 2010. Cynthia performs Inherent Contradictions at the Kuandu Arts Festival with David Cutler.

Inherent Contradictions, a discipline-breaking collaboration between dancer-choreographer Cynthia Ling Lee and pianist-composer David Cutler combines music and movement in unconventional ways. North Indian rhythms transform into nonsensical English slang, a classical pianist turns into an unruly comic-book super-hero, and the line between dancer and musician becomes increasingly blurred throughout the course of the evening. The diverse works in this full-length program cross cultural as well as disciplinary borders, with unique vocabularies that draw on the traditions of North Indian classical kathak, postmodern dance, jazz music, and western contemporary classical music.

22-3 October, 2010

Kuandu Arts Festival

Taipei National University of the Arts

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1. Long Beach, USA. 15 May 2010. Cynthia Ling Lee and Shyamala Moorty present Post Natyam Unveiled: an intimate look at a transnational choreographic process.

mesmerized, the camera’s gaze caresses a woman’s pregnant belly... two bodies intertwine like amoebas...cross-rhythmic voices interrupt and lose each other on a SKYPE call

Join Post Natyam Collective members Cynthia Lee and Shyamala Moorty in an informal lecture-demonstration and performance that reveals the inner workings of this transnational contemporary South Asian dance collective. Using video and live multimedia performance, we will share our ongoing creative process (www.postnatyam.blogspot.com), which re-routes the erotic artistic legacy of South Asian courtesans through internet technologies and is informed by our community work with survivors of domestic violence. The evening will also include live performances of “not two not one,” a duet that collides North Indian kathak with contact improvisation to depict a relationship so intimate that it’s not always clear where one person starts and the other ends, and “dreaming in taal,” a sinuous, meditative kathak/tabla duet featuring live musical accompaniment by tabla (North Indian drums) player Ravi Deo.

“Post Natyam Unveiled” is part of the Khmer Arts Salon series curated by Prumsodun Ok, a monthly program of intimate lecture demonstrations by artists from across California and abroad. The Post Natyam Collective’s long-distance creative project will come together as a live evening-length performance presented by TeAda Productions in Los Angeles in January 2011.

2. New York, USA. June 4 -6, 2010. Cynthia performs “ruddha (rude, huh?)” as part of Erasing Borders: Festival of Indian Dance.

The Indo-American Arts Council and Asia Society present Erasing Borders: Festival of Indian Dance. The mission of this festival and conference is to present Indian dance through its multiplicity of forms and expressions. The festival will explore the complexities of aesthetics, sensibilities, issues and perspectives while celebrating rich tradition in Indian dance and nurturing exciting new dimensions developing in the Indian, American and global contexts. The festival is a one-of-its-kind in New York that seeks to bring together dancers sharing movement, heritage and inspiration from the Indian subcontinent.

3. Los Angeles, USA. June 18-20, 2010. Cynthia Ling Lee and Sheetal Gandhi premiere their new multimedia choreographic collaboration at the Artwallah Festival: Afterlife.

Cynthia Lee and Sheetal Gandhi explore the notion of reincarnation through interactive media and contemporary dance. Working with a time delay video capture technology manipulated live by multimedia artist Jesse Gilbert and an original score by Ellen Reid, the performers engage in movement confrontations with their past selves. Artwallah, North America's renowned producer of dynamic South Asian diasporic art, now in its 10th year, partners with Highways in presenting Afterlife. Classically grass-roots in nature but modern in form and context, Artwallah's fringing of music, dance, solo performance/stand-up, literature, poetry, film and visual art, digs deeply into its ethnic roots: Bangladesh, Bhutan, India, the Maldives, Nepal, Pakistan and Sri Lanka to find its fusion in a uniquely American expressionism.

4. New York, USA. July 16, 2010. Cynthia performs “ruddha (rude, huh?)” at Dance Theater Workshop as part of World Dance Alliance’s In Time Together: Viewing and Reviewing Contemporary Dance.

The World Dance Alliance Global Dance Event is a conference and festival which will bring together an international cohort of over 300 dance artists, scholars, educators, and students from more than 25 countries and around the United States. The Event’s theme, In Time Together: Viewing and Reviewing Contemporary Dance Practice, encourages broad investigation of relationships between dance and temporality. The theme particularly emphasizes the contemporary-- con-/together + tempus/time. However, it also seeks to raise questions of how dance, often characterized as the most ephemeral or immediate of art forms and cultural practices, negotiates and has negotiated time. As such, the event urges participants to view and review—to inspect and reconsider— the many different modes of experiencing dance, which include but are not limited to performing, choreographing, teaching, scoring, notating, watching, remembering, documenting, reviewing, describing, evaluating, and writing. The Event takes place in conjunction with the Dance Critics Association’s annual conference in an effort to increase dialogue between artists and critics.