What Flows Between Us Festival

“There’s a particular urgency and joy in spotlighting powerful women artists — not just as performers, but as choreographers, collaborators, and cultural makers.” — Rachna Nivas

Kathak artist, educator, arts activist, and 92NY Artist in Residence Rachna Nivas curates a day-long celebration of Indian classical dance and music — a rich, living tradition, in conversation with other genres, being carried forward by women artists shaping its future.

What Flows Between Us takes its name from the fluid intelligence of feminine energy — like water and rivers, it is expansive, adaptable, and shaped by the landscapes it moves through. While the festival brings together classical traditions from North and South India — forms with rigorously distinct movement languages, musical systems, and histories that are often misunderstood as one — it also illuminates the resonances they share with Western classical and jazz: rhythm, improvisation, poetry, devotion, and the embodied passing down of lineage.

The day unfolds in community, with morning and afternoon performances by leading musicians and dancers, an all day market offering artisanal goods, traditional Indian food, and space for gathering across generations. It all leads to the New York premiere of SPEAK — a collaboration between Kathak virtuoso Rachna Nivas, Fulbright scholar Rukhmani Mehta, MacArthur Fellow Michelle Dorrance, and tap legend Dormeshia — in a rhythmic conversation between Kathak and American tap. 

Presented as part of Women Move the World, 92NY’s 2025/26 Harkness Mainstage Series, this festival is both rooted and radical — honoring centuries of tradition while amplifying women’s voices as creators, curators, and culture-shapers in the present day.

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