How PECDA is showing up for contemporary dance

PECDA revitalizes India's contemporary dance scene, offering crucial support and opportunities amidst dwindling institutional backing.

“What is happening here?” said one friend to another (unsurprisingly) during a moment of complete silence in the contemporary dance work being performed on stage. We were in the audience at the 7th edition of the Prakriti Excellence in Contemporary Dance Awards (PECDA), a biennial event that provides financial support, mentorship, and performance and networking opportunities through an open competition for contemporary dance practitioners.

This unfiltered audience member at the Bangalore International Centre auditorium wasn’t entirely to blame for their baffled query. The more one watches such live performances, the easier it is to understand abstract work.

India’s contemporary dance landscape is perennially in a dicey situation — lack of consistent funding, dwindling grants for creation and research, no institutional support (other than education and training), and hardly any critical writing around it. In this fragile ecosystem, being an opportunity that shows up consistently has been PECDA’s greatest win. Over the past 14 years and seven editions, it has stamped itself as the only publicly-available Rosetta Stone to understand the tangential explorations of our nation’s contemporary dance choreographers. It has also turned into an occasion to spend a weekend watching performances, attending workshops, and talking with dancers from all over India.

Performances at PECDA

The runway of opportunities provided by PECDA begins with its jury, a mix of national and international stakeholders. This year saw Saido Lehlouh, co-director of the Centre Chorégraphique National de Rennes et de Bretagne in France return, along with other key names from countries such as Australia, the U.K. and Thailand.

This committee was tasked with paring down the written proposals of 52 choreographers — the highest number of applicants till date — to 12 practitioners. The semi-finalists presented 10-minute excerpts of their dance works over two sessions, and then five finalists received individual sessions of feedback from the jury, had a day of mentoring with senior choreographers, and got rehearsal time to change up any technical factors of their presentations.