As part of the 5th year anniversary Women’s Day and Women’s History Month Celebration, Navarasa Dance Theater hosted two workshops recently for the participants of ‘When Earth sings’, and for the first time opened it to the public to highlight, according to Aparna Sindhoor, navarasa’s dancer and choreographer “issues that do not enter into the mainstream consciousness”

The first workshop entitled Bloodlines: Women Writing in times of war, addressed issues on how women are affected during war. Prof Rajini Srikanth who teaches in the English department and Asian American Studies program at the University of Massachusetts, picked up a Collection of Poems from around the World that voiced the poet’s feelings in terms of loss, of love and the meaning of life. The workshop introduced the poetry of Razia Hussain of Bangladesh, Dahlia Ravikovitch of Israel, Laila al Siah of Palestine and a short story ‘The Future’ of Daisy Al Amir, an Iraqi writer of a women’s belief of a future without war through a simple action of buying a dress and making it a symbol of her defiance. The poems were stirring and made one believe that even though Poetry is not the solution to a peaceful world, it can be the beginning of one and can be a forceful form of change. This was followed by a singing workshop by Brian Rawson.

The second workshop explored the history of indentured labor which lay mainly in the subjugation of India by the British and its incorporation into the British Empire. Prof Gautam Premnath who teaches English and Asian American Studies at the University of Massachusetts, introduced the topic at the workshop entitled Coolie Odysseys: Story of South Asian Indenture. Relating it to the Script of Plantation Talas written by Raju Sivasankaran, the workshop focused on Indians who were taken over as indentured labor to far-flung parts of the empire in the nineteenth-century, one of them being British Guyana. The Indians were forced to sign contracts that they barely understood and women and children were not spared in the process.

These two workshops culminate in "When Earth Sings" a Dance Theater by Aparna Sindhoor The performance is on March 14 and 15 at 8pm At Tower Auditorium of Mass Art, 621 Huntington Avenue, Boston.

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