Chicago Dancemakers Forum 2021 Digital Dance Grant Recipient

Ashwaty Chennat creates for live dance and film as part of her socio-cultural practice. As recipient of the first Chicago Dancemakers Digital Dance Award in 2021, she has gathered a team in a project specifically centering intersectionality in diasporic cultures through narrative.

The Project

The HCL residency supports her expanding collaboration with the drag artist Abhijeet to create a digital film version of Moods of Nayika, their ongoing multimedia performance project that explores gender, queerness and the body in South Asian culture. Titled after the eight types of “nayikas”, or heroines, as Bharata Muni classified in the 200 BC Sanskrit treatise, Moods of Nayika aims to distort and transform the heroine’s archetypal states which through the ages appears in Indian painting, literature, sculpture, dance and music.

The standard nayika portrayal, typically authored by cis men, is in relationship to a lover and depicts conventions about separation, jealousy, and waiting. Chennat and Abhijeet aim with Moods of Nayika to open the frame and challenge the gender construct from the lens of trans and queer voices. The projects is part of the collaborators’ rejection of the exclusion of LGBTQ+ representation of characters with true agency in the South Asian canon, and returns the heroine to time erased by history.

The digital film Moods of Nayika is planned for release as eight episodes, each featuring a drag performance by Abhijeet and dance theatre performance by Chennat, and available on streaming platforms. Additional creative collaborators include: Transit Productions, a trans-led film collective whose work uplifts Chicago's queer communities; Connor Torres, co-creator and co-producer of Moods of Nayika (2017); and JForPay Designs, which contributed costume and production design and cinematographer-designer of Moods of Nayika (2017).

Major project support is provided by Mandala South Asian Performing Arts, Chicago Dancemakers Forum’s Digital Dance Grant initiative, and A Queer Pride.

About the Artists

Ashwaty Chennat is an interdisciplinary performing artist, filmmaker and educator based in Chicago. She grew up in Ann Arbor, Michigan, where she studied ballet and jazz with Deena Fournier and Lisa Holland and began training in Bharatanatyam dance with Sudha Chandrasekhar (Detroit). She completed her Arangetram in 2008, and continues her training in Bharatanatyam with Laksha Dantran and Pranita Nayar. She is a twice-awarded Illinois Arts Council Apprentice under Nayar in Abhinaya, the storytelling component of classical Indian dance forms, and is also trained in the South Asian dance forms Mohiniyattam, South Indian folk, and Bollywood. In addition to dance, Chennat is trained in Carnatic and western vocal music and theatre. She holds a BA in sociology and film from the University of Michigan.

Chennat has directed and choreographed several works, including contemporary movement to Stravinsky’s "Firebird Suite" at Chicago Symphony Center, under conductor Sameer Patel, and "Masks and Myths" at the Logan Center for the Arts, produced by Mandala South Asian Performing Arts. She curates the Mandala Makers Festival, and her work has been recognized by the Pivot Arts and 3Arts. She is a 2021 Chicago Dancemakers Digital Dance Award recipient. She collaborates on many projects with jazz percussionist Alvin Cobb, Jr., and has created movement set to Bach’s Suite in D Minor with cellist Mauro Valli.

Abhijeet is based in Chicago and a multimedia artist and drag queen from Mumbai, India. They combine live performance with video, photography, fashion and events to produce art that is larger than life. They generally tend to explore themes of racial and queer gender identity with camp and fashion.