Courtesy of Nandini Sikand.
Sun, December 13 at 7 PM (doors 6:30 PM)
Tickets: Free with RSVP (ALL AGES, OPEN TO THE PUBLIC)
RSVP HERE
Injuries and aging are not for primetime. Herniated discs, a frozen shoulder and arthritic thumbs — hardly a portrait of a dancer. Dance favors spectacle and often fetishizes the body via virtuosity and seamless choreography such that the labor of the dancing, sweating, injured body is hidden. A Catalogue of Fragility (2026) wrestles with ideas of fragility, corporeality, the aging body, the compromised body to ask what kind of performance is borne of these limitations? What remains possible? What is enhanced by pain and injury? This project is not an attempt at physical normativity but rather an intervention into how flexibility and speed are foregrounded over the invisibility of performance labor, a form of labor that is tied to neoliberal contexts of self-improvement and maximizing the body (Pillai, 2026).
A Catalogue of Fragility “ables” the fragile, dancing body, reconstituted and pieced together through three layers – a solo dancer, music, and 16mm film which is analog to the low-tech, aging body, a body that is not reproducible, but yet spirals on despite a tear, a missing sprocket and runs noisily when projected. Filmed in Delhi and Pondicherry, the project juxtaposes past and present to “recorporealize” the body on screen while laying bare some of the process behind the performance.
ABOUT THE ARTISTS
Imprinted in New Delhi, Nandini Sikand (they, she) is an educator, writer, filmmaker, choreographer-dancer and parent. Their experimental and documentary films about the prison industrial complex, immigration, nationalism, sex work, breast cancer, and counter-culture music have screened worldwide. A 2018 Guggenheim Fellowship funded Inside/Outside (2019), a feature documentary film about incarcerated women and the challenges of reentry in the Lehigh Valley. The Jerome Foundation (1998), the Center for Asian American Media (2010) and New York State Council on the Arts (2010 and 2001) grant have also supported their other films. Sikand co-founded three dance companies and performed at several venues in New Delhi, and New York City. In 2013-14, Nandini was awarded an American Association of University Women (AAUW) postdoctoral fellowship towards their book project, Languid Bodies, Grounded Stances: The Curving Pathway of Neoclassical Odissi Dance (Berghahn Books, 2016). They are currently working on two book projects; Visualizing the Thug(gee): Colonial Lithographs to Carcer- al Screens, and a collection of essays about parenting while brown Parenting in Pennsyltucky. A professor of film and media studies at Lafayette College in Pennsyl- vania, Nandini is a certified yoga instructor (Vinyasa and Kundalini) and teaches at Northampton County Prison where they also offer college-level courses.
Andy Smith is a writer, filmmaker, photographer and teaches at Lafayette College in Easton, PA.
MONO NO AWARE is a cinema arts non-profit organization and learning lab based at 33 Flatbush Avenue in Downtown Brooklyn, New York. Established in 2007, MONO is a community of working individuals of commensurate interests concerning cinema, its histories, its practices, its technologies and its possibilities. This is a community broadly appreciative of the cinematic art-form and its variants spanning generations. MONO constitutes a haven and facility for the exploration, practice, exhibition, production and preservation of the cinematic arts. MONO receives year-round support from the New York State Council on the Arts, Festival partners and patrons such as yourself. This screening performance is part of our 20th anniversary program taking place across the city. To learn more: https://www.mononoawarefilm.com/mono-no-aware-xx-program