Practice
Rooted in Odissi and extended through scholarship and embodiment, Dr. Kaustavi Sarkar’s practice positions dance as a living archive of culture. See how, below.
Performance
Sarkar is an Odissi soloist, Odissi is an eastern Indian traditional art. Her career in durational Odissi performance reflects her deep investment in canonical repertoire in Guru Kelucharan Mohapatra style. Her performance at the famous Mukteshwar Festival 2026 organized by the Odia Language, Literature & Culture Department, Government of Odisha. Her dance was accompanied by her Guru, Ratikant Mohapatra, son of the legendary Guru Kelucharan Mohapatra. She centers her embodied knowledge as a sedimentation of culture, technique, and history. She is a prolific contributor in performance/ choreography as well as writing. Sarkar believes that dance is enough and dance is epistemologically significant. In a review, artist/ scholar Sriradha Paul writes that Sarkar "reframes technique as socially and politically situated labor, underscoring the need to recognize embodied practices as intersections of history, culture, technology, and justice."
Embodiment
Through her dual career in academia and performance, Dr. Kaustavi Sarkar exemplifies the scholar-artist model—one in which embodied practice and intellectual inquiry operate in dialogue, enriching both the stage and the classroom. Her creative process is distinctly both traditional and contemporary. Drawing from canonical movement structures while engaging with modern compositional strategies, Dr. Sarkar’s choreographic and performance work explores themes of identity, perception, embodiment, and cultural memory. Her works have been presented in academic, community, and performance settings in India and internationally, where they have been recognized for their intellectual depth, clarity of movement language, and thoughtful engagement with classical forms in contemporary contexts. She works with choreographers as their muse and has commissioned new works by Dr. Rohini Dandavate, Dr. Maya Kulkarni, Dr. Ananya Chatterjea, and Guru Aruna Mohanty.
Past Performances
Videos
Happy Valley Indian Performing Arts Festival (2017)
The Happy Valley Indian Performing Arts Festival 2017 proudly featured Odissi exponent Kaustavi Sarkar and her troupe at Ohio State Odissi.
Vibhatsya: Deconstructing the Smile (2018)
Vibhatsya investigates the aesthetic, political, cultural, philosophical, ethical, and social constructions behind the smile, a conventional feature of a classically trained dancing body.
TEDxCharlotte | Dance is Just (2021)
Dance is a technology of coordinating different parts of the human body just as a sociological experiment of uniting multiple cultures. As a microcosm of the universe, movement can provide a just way of being in conversation with a difference across race, class, gender, sexuality, caste, and religion. In this way, dance can be truly a technology of social justice.