92NY Harkness Dance Center announces What Flows Between Us: A Festival of India’s Classical Arts in Cross-Cultural Dialogue, a day-long immersion into the depth, rigor, and expansive imagination of the Indian classical arts. Curated by renowned kathak artist, choreographer, educator, and 92NY Artist in Residence Rachna Nivas, the festival gathers extraordinary women from North and South Indian classical music, dance, percussion, and poetry—artists whose lifelong devotion to mastery is matched by their thoughtful engagement with cross-genre collaboration. Vendor markets will be active throughout the day, offering traditional food and artisanal goods and the festival culminates with the New York premiere of SPEAK, a groundbreaking rhythmic conversation between kathak and American tap featuring Nivas, Fulbright scholar Rukhmani Mehta, MacArthur Fellow Michelle Dorrance, and tap legend Dormeshia.

The festival is presented as part of Women Move the World, 92NY’s 2025/26 Harkness Mainstage Series. For tickets and more information, visit https://www.92ny.org/event/what-flows-between-us.

“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

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.

But the festival also emphasizes that true cross-genre dialogue can only emerge from profound knowledge of one’s own form—a principle rooted in Nivas’s training under her guru Pandit Chitresh Das. Rather than “fusion,” these artists embody a shared ethos: maintain the integrity of their form while finding common ground, treating differences not as something to dilute or absorb, but as essential to a world where plurality thrives.

“Collaboration is not a shortcut or a gimmick; at its highest level, it is an act of integrity — the culmination of years of disciplined study,” comments Rachna Nivas. “Only from that depth can artists recognize shared currents without erasing difference, and create work that is rooted, honest, and transformative. When we collaborate from this place of mastery and reverence, we begin to see the nuances that flow between us across borders, traditions, and histories, expanding our lens of humanity through art.”

Evening Performance—SPEAK
The festival closes with the New York premiere of SPEAK, an acclaimed collaboration between kathak and American tap. Conceived by kathak virtuosos Rachna Nivas and Rukhmani Mehta, and co-created with MacArthur Fellow Michelle Dorrance and tap legend Dormeshia, SPEAK brings together four veteran artists whose years of dialogue and artistic exchange have forged a rare cross-genre kinship. Developed over several years and now being remounted and further expanded through a Works & Process residency, the work arrives in New York at a moment of renewed creative depth and artistic rigor.

Though born continents and centuries apart, kathak and tap share parallel histories of struggle, resilience, and community. In SPEAK, these dynamic, percussive traditions converge in a captivating collaboration that interweaves rhythm, poetry, storytelling, music, and dance. Since its 2017 U.S. premiere to sold-out audiences and its subsequent touring across major cities in India and the U.S., SPEAK has earned widespread critical acclaim for its artistic virtuosity and social resonance. Carried by an ensemble of leading Indian classical and jazz musicians, SPEAK celebrates lineage, improvisation, and the capacity of women artists to push tradition forward without compromising its integrity.