Browse Exhibits (13 total)

For many dancers, movement is their primary language. For as Isadora Duncan, one of the founding figures in modern dance, stated - "If I could tell you what it meant, there would be no point in dancing it". Dance, and specifically the raw emotion of modern dance, is wielded to make an argument, express a view, convey nuanced opinions - all of the features of a traditional language. However, the weakness of modern dance lies in its lack of a written language. Without a universal means of annotating modern dance, there has been an immeasurable cultural loss, especially of early modern dance. In this project, I explore the difficulties in creating a language for modern dance, and how I believe modern dance can be best preserved for the future.

Hi! My name is Yash Kumbhat. I was born and raised in Kolkata, West Bengal, though my family is originally from Jodhpur, Rajasthan. My project is, in some sense, my own attempt to engage with my family's past through my grandparents. In this exhibition, I have displayed a small number of poems and one recipe — the former written by my grandfather, and the latter by my grandmother — both of which I find to be a fascinating insight to the values and traditions in which they were raised, and in which they raised their children. This also has the potential to blossom into a much larger oral history project. Every winter, I spend my holidays in Jaipur with my grandparents, and every year, they tell us stories about their lives and the things they've done and seen, but no one ever writes any of this down! I would like to, and this is only the beginning.