Chitra Vairavan is a Tamil-American artist, seeker and contemporary indian dancer/choreographer. Her embodied practice and experimental process is rooted in deep listening, spatial observation, freedoms, poetry, vulnerability and ancestral memory. She chooses to gesture towards and embody within the practice of liberation and decolonization in creative and collaborative choices. Vairavan dances to heal and creates dance to help heal others. The aesthetic of her movement is through both yoga and contemporary Indian dance forms – a mixture of training in Bharatanatyam, Odissi and Yorchha™.
Named "25 to Watch" in 2017
Schooled in Bharatanatyam and muscular, percussive Chhau- and Odissi-based choreography, her fearlessness in revealing the personal as political earned her a 2016 McKnight Fellowship for Dancers. Vairavan's ardor for igniting change through dance is as innate as it is intentional. Watch her soar. —Camille LeFevre
Read her highlight in Dance Magazine (full article archived here)
