Performance of Classical Indian Dance at the KFG Closing Conference by Yashoda Thakore

— Isabella Schwaderer

As part of the closing event of the KFG Closing Conference 2026 Dr. Yashoda Thakore will present Dancing as Memory, Memory as Resistance: The Living Repertoire of the Kalavantulu — a performance lecture that speaks directly to the conference’s central concern with the reciprocal formations of religion, urbanity, memory, and social worlds.

The performance is open to the general public and will take place at Brunnenkirche in Erfurt on June 2, 2026, at 7:00 PM.

Kalavantulu are female singers and dancers historically known as devadasis. They originate from the two south-eastern Indian states of Andhra Pradesh and Telangana. Traditionally, they were dedicated to the temples and were regarded as highly respected guardians of the classical arts.

Yashoda Thakore is widely recognized for her distinctive approach to classical Indian dance, combining rigorous performance practice with scholarly research. She began her training in Kuchipudi, one of the eight major Indian classical dance forms, which originated in Andhra Pradesh, under the renowned teachers Shobha Naidu and Vempati Chinna Satyam. She spent over fourteen years immersed in the tradition before expanding her artistic and intellectual horizons further through study with Swapna Sundari.

Over the past years, the research group Religion and Urbanity: Reciprocal Formations has explored how religious practices, urban environments, social structures, and forms of knowledge shape one another across global and historical contexts. Yashoda Thakore’s work offers a compelling extension of these questions into the realm of embodied cultural memory. Her performance foregrounds a tradition that emerged within the interconnected worlds of temple, court, and urban salon culture in coastal Andhra Pradesh, while also tracing the violent disruptions in its history. Rather than approaching these histories solely through archives or textual sources, the performance asks:

What does a dancing body remember? And what happens to that memory when an entire tradition of women performers is systematically silenced?

Through specific dance items such as padams, varnams, jāvalis, and swarapallavis transmitted through generations of Kalavantulu women, Yashoda demonstrates how memory survives not only in documents, but in gesture, rhythm, affect, and embodied practice and have been passed down through generations of women, body to body, in an unbroken line of matrilineal transmission. The Kalavantulu faced sustained efforts to erase their art through colonial anti-nautch legislation, nationalist reform movements, and deeply entrenched caste prejudice. Yet the repertoire survived. This presentation asks how this could occur and argues that the answer lies in the dance itself: in abhinaya, in rhythmic memory, in the intelligence of a trained body that carries history in ways no document can.

Bringing together artistic performance and scholarly reflection, the presentation resonates closely with the conference’s broader attempt to rethink research paradigms and forms of knowledge production. It invites audiences to consider performance not merely as illustration, but as a mode of theorizing and historical transmission in its own right — one that challenges conventional boundaries between archive and body, scholarship and practice, memory and living tradition.

Driven by a deep commitment to understanding hereditary performance traditions from within, Yashoda later worked directly with Kalavantulu communities in the Godavari Delta, engaging with the living legacies of temple, court, and salon dance cultures. This engagement has shaped the distinctive character of her work, marked by both historical sensitivity and artistic innovation.

Alongside her career as a performer, Yashoda pursued advanced academic research, earning a Master’s degree in Dance and a doctorate focusing on Yoga and Dance. Her scholarly contributions include, together with noted arts scholar Pappu Venugopala Rao, the English translation of the thirteenth-century Sanskrit dance treatise NṛttaRatnāvali, published to critical acclaim in 2013. She is also the author of Kaivalya: Joy in Yoga and Dance and has prepared a critical edition of NṛttaRatnāvali for publication through the Indira Gandhi National Centre for the Arts.

Yashoda has performed extensively across India and internationally, appearing at major festivals and institutions including the Khajuraho Dance Festival, Konark Dance Festival, Madras Music Academy, the Nehru Centre, and the International Kuchipudi Dance Convention. In addition to her stage work, she regularly conducts lectures, workshops, and conference presentations on dance, yoga, and South Asian performance traditions in India and abroad.

In recognition of her sustained artistic and scholarly contributions, Yashoda was awarded the Ugadi Puraskar by the Government of Andhra Pradesh in 2017. She is a faculty member at the University of Hyderabad and Chair of the Department of Kuchipudi Dance at Aria University (Miltipas, California).

This evening’s performance at the Brunnenkirche will lend a distinctive dimension to the conference, offering participants a rare opportunity to encounter an artistic tradition that is still all too rarely represented on German stages.

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