Unrehearsed Artist Residency 2026
Art Share: Day 2 Program
Program
Land Acknowledgement
Welcome
Art Shares by Ricardo, Varsha, ameia
Artist Talk Back
Ricardo Roman (Mexico City)
Ricardo Román Torres is a dancer based in Mexico City. His love for Kuchipudi has taken him far in his training and artistic development.
He began studying Indian performing arts in 2015 through Bharatanatyam and Mohiniyattam courses at the Gurudev Tagore Indian Cultural Center. In 2018, upon discovering his interest in Kuchipudi, he began formal training under Yamini Saripalli and Kasi Aysola, initially online and through frequent travel to the United States. He currently continues his studies as a disciple of Smt. Kalpana Sreenivas Jayanti.
In December 2022, he completed his Rangapravesam in Chennai, India, with community support via GoFundMe. He performed in Nandanar Charitam, taking a small role, and in March 2023 participated in the Intersections Dance Festival in Washington, DC, as a crew member of Prakriti Dance Company presenting Through Fish Eyes.
Ricardo organizes Indian performing arts events in Mexico, including performances, workshops, and classes. He has also pursued coursework in dance history and critical dance studies with Priya Srinivasan and Yashoda Thakore, shaping his interest in presenting alternative narratives within Indian performing traditions, particularly in foreign contexts such as Mexico.
Recently, he has explored choreography, collaborating with Ixchel, a Carnatic violinist, and the poet Ricardo Rosales, aiming to create works connected to his context and identity. His teaching of Kuchipudi, especially to children, has further inspired him to explore new directions in the practice.
A note about the piece:
Tonada de lluvia is a piece that seeks to draw on and expand elements of Kuchipudi, Carnatic music, and electronic music in order to express something personal: something about our communities, our city, and the different realities that shape it. Our piece seeks to create something that, as performers, allows us to move beyond simply reproducing distant stories from India. Instead, it looks toward our own myths and the stories that surround us every day, finding melodies and movements within them. Through countless calls across different time zones, as well as a brief period of time that we were able to share together in Mexico City, we created this piece by bringing together our ideas about rain, our city, and the echoes of the mythical image of the god Tlaloc.
Made in collaboration with Ixchel.
Ixchel is a Mexican musician, composer, producer, and DJ specializing in Carnatic violin. She studied composition and arranging and has been studying Carnatic music since 2014 with renowned Indian violinist Ganesh Rajagopalan. Her artistic career is closely connected to India, where she has traveled regularly since 2005, particularly to Chennai, where she has studied, performed, and collaborated with a number of musicians. Throughout her career, she has worked with artists from both the Carnatic and Hindustani traditions, including Nirmala Rajasekar, Ramya Ramesh, Kartikeya Vashist, and Rohit Prasanna. She has also explored the incorporation of traditional South Indian instruments such as the ghatam and nadaswaram into contemporary productions. In 2010, she produced Soma, a project combining electronic music with Indian music. Since then, she has continued developing an artistic practice that brings together her training in Indian musical traditions with contemporary composition and music production. Her productions are available on various digital platforms.
Varsha Iyengar (San Francisco)
Varsha Iyengar is a movement practitioner and creative technologist based in San Francisco, USA and Bangalore, India. Her work integrates movement and technology to create multifaceted immersive performance environments rooted in inquiry and multidisciplinary collaboration, inviting equitable and critical examinations of technology within an arts practice.
Her current project, Decoding Digital Bodies is a collaboration with Jessica Rajko that investigates how movement influences robotics research and development, with a particular focus on Boston Dynamics Spot robots. She is also directing and producing an international project based in India titled "Where Things Go", an exploration of the intricate and often unseen relationships we have with everyday objects and technological tools.
Varsha's dance practices are rooted in Bharatanatyam and Contemporary dance. In the past, she has been a dancer for Nritarutya, an Indian Contemporary dance company in Bangalore, India. As a founding member of Driven Arts Collective, a California-based collective, Varsha has developed works such as CELSO, Khora, and Digital Milk, which explore themes of digital futures co-authored by humans and AI-driven emerging technologies. These pieces have been presented at CounterPulse, SAFEhouse Arts, and ODC in San Francisco, supported by grants such as the CLTC. Her academic work and research on data capture and analysis of vernacular movement have been presented at multiple conferences including MOCO and CHI. She also sits on the Board of Directors at CCAM, an artist-run platform based in Chicago.
A note about the piece:
Vocab2/0 investigates the invisible patterns choreographed into the body and the transmission paths that carry them there: heritage, vocation, training or habit. Rooted in my earlier thesis on statistically analyzing vernacular movement, the work turns that research inward, examining how my body absorbs and carries patterns through repetition, observation, and shared life with other people and the environment around us.
Collaborators:
Music Technologist: Abhinay Khoparzi
Creative Technologist and Production Support: Adithya Aggarwal
Costume Design: Purvi Kaul
Lighting: Erin Yen
Documentation: Carmen Veronica
Acknowledgements for previous roots: Driven Arts Collective
ameia camielle smith (Los Angeles)
ameia’s first memories are of lemongrass, rain, and mosquito nets. she is of mixed afro-indian ancestry and is committed to the life and memory of the seeds, shells, and stories that live at the intersections of these diasporas. ameia’s creative work spans disciplines, including seed keeping, archiving, performance, and prose, and is grounded in the practice of ‘love [as] a commitment to attention’ (Deborah Thomas).
ameia holds a BA in Geography from UC Berkeley and trained with the Alonzo King LINES Ballet Training Ground in 2025. she was a company member with PUSH Dance Company from 2022-2026 and has performed at several venues including Dance Mission Theater, the Alvin Ailey Citigroup Theater, and the Minnesota Street Project. her recent explorations include drag and dance theater. currently, she is based in Los Angeles.
A note about the piece:
"When it was over, and houses instead grew in the hills, those trees that had been spared dreamed of their comrades for years afterward and their nightmare mutterings annoyed the diamondbacks who left them for the new growth that came to life in spaces the sun saw for the first time. Then the rain changed and was no longer equal. Now it rained not for just an hour every day at the same time, but in seasons, abusing the river even more. Poor insulted, brokenhearted river. Poor demented stream. Now it sat in one place like a grandmother and became a swamp..."
- Toni Morrison, Tar Baby
Music Credits:
Vocals by Sharada Shashidhar, Keys by Moki Kawaguchi, Bass by Caleb Buchanan
Pt. 1: Original Composition by Sharada, Moki, & Caleb
Pt. 2: "I Got It Bad and That Ain't Good." Arrangement by Sharada, Moki, & Caleb, inspired by Nina Simone's 1961 arrangement of the jazz standard. Original composition by Duke Ellington (1941).
Funders
Unrehearsed Artist Residency is created by Nava Dance Theatre, and is a part of the Unrehearsed Activism program, supported by the California Arts Council Impact Grant, San Francisco Arts Commission, Zellerbach Family Foundation, general operating grants, and individual donors. Consider donating to keep this program going! All donations are tax deductible in the US.
Nava Dance Theatre is a 501(C)3 Registered Non-Profit Organization.
Special thanks
We would like to thank those who supported this work through community engagement programs, being present for work-in-progress sharings, having 1:1 conversations with many artists, and advising on the direction of this program. We would like to especially thank ALL the artists in this years URP cohort, for being so open to process over product and really digging deep into their work.
URP Leadership
Program Director: Nadhi Thekkek
Program Facilitators: Talin Subbaraya & Nadhi Thekkek
Program Manager: ankita sharma
Co-creator and Former Director: Tanu Sreedharan