https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PhF5WlfmTYw&t=41s

Hari Krishnan is a dancer, choreographer, scholar, and educator who specializes in Bharatanatyam, queer dance and contemporary dance from global perspectives.

Krishnan’s choreography explores post-colonial complexities in Indian dance and queer themes, as well as the intersection between traditional South Asian and global contemporary dance forms. His extensive body of work is based on critical perspectives on Bharatanatyam, fused with contemporary global dance styles and postmodern social critique. Some of his pieces are bombastic, boldly confronting political and sociological issues. Works such as Holy Cow(s)! (2017) – spawned when, while eating lunch together, someone expressed surprise that Krishnan was eating a beef burger – are designed to challenge stereotypes and reclaim control over narratives of sexuality, religion, and culture in a Western-dominated global arts world. He is also the artistic director of inDANCE (indance.ca), which he founded in 1999.

For over two decades, he had trained with hereditary courtesan teachers in South India who were the original repositories of Bharatanatyam. He is also engaged in critical and ethical mediated reconstructions of South Indian courtean dances and techniques from the 18th and early 20th centuries. Krishnan performs and choreographs them through extensive research. The goal is to engage with critical dance history in multiple ways, while expanding its contemporary methods and creating contemporary currency for South Asian classical dance.

Krishnan’s scholarly repertoire is as extensive as his choreographic one. His research covers historic and sociological themes, from queerness and global cultural politics in dance to the history of devadasi-courtesan dance to representations of Bharatanatyam on film. These themes bleed into his choreography, and vice-versa. His monograph, Celluloid Classicism: Early Tamil Cinema and the Making of Modern Bharatanatyam (Wesleyan University Press, 2019) won a special citation from the 2020 de la Torre Bueno^© First Book Award Committee of the Dance Studies Association. The book has been hailed as “an invaluable addition to the scholarship on Bharatanatyam.”    

Some of his awards and nominations include a Jacob’s Pillow Lab Residency (spring 2024), a recipient of Wesleyan’s Provost Research Award (2023), a National Dance Project Grant (2023) for his upcoming creation 'Rowdies in Love', Eldred Family Choreography Nomination (2021), two Mellon Foundation Grants (2021 and 2023- co-recipient (initiated by Professor Lionel Popkin) with SADA- South Asian Diasporic Dance Artists), Eramus Mundus Residency Award (Europe, 2015); Bessie Nomination (2013) for Outstanding Performance- New York Dance and Performance Awards (New York City); Bessie Schoenberg Choreographic Residency Award – The Yard (USA, 2013); Desi Canadian Achiever Award (2011); Dora Mavor Moore Nomination (2009) for Best Choreography (Theater) and recipient of several grants from Toronto Arts Council, Ontario Arts Council, Canada Council for the Arts, Bank of Montreal and Laidlaw Foundation.

https://www.mdpi.com/2076-0752/12/3/122

https://www.hfsbooks.com/books/celluloid-classicism-krishnan/

http://magazine.blogs.wesleyan.edu/2020/05/01/eury-german-16-dance-as-a-conduit-to-self/

http://magazine.blogs.wesleyan.edu/2020/05/01/krishnans-students-feeling-the-dance-thanking-the-ground-releasing-the-diva/

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xiEDn2Btan8

https://danceinteractive.jacobspillow.org/themes-essays/what-is-dance/introduction-to-bharatanatyam/

https://danceinteractive.jacobspillow.org/themes-essays/what-is-dance/contemporary-bharatanatyam-at-jacobs-pillow/