ABOUT THE ENSEMBLE

Parijat began Parijat Desai Dance Company (2000-2013), an ensemble of dancers, in Los Angeles in 2000, as a platform to explore hybridizing Indian classical and contemporary dance techniques and to experiment with choreographic approaches. She also investigated new ways to work with Carnatic and Hindustani music systems to generate scores for contemporary dance. Parijat created works including Thaka Dimi, Rewired, The Wall, Quiet/Fire, Malaysia, Make Space, and Songs To Live For with the company. During this period Parijat collaborated with various musicians including Taiko master Kenny Endo, violin virtuoso Arun Ramamurthy, and table/jazz drums expert Sameer Gupta. 

While based in Los Angeles, Parijat (as a soloist) and the PDDC ensemble were presented by venues including Highways Performance Space, California Plaza, and the J. Paul Getty Museum; Parijat won a Lester Horton Award for Performance, Durfee Foundation Artist Fellowship, a commission from Grand Performances/LA, and a three-year California Arts Council grant. She was in Attakalari Centre for Movement Arts’s ChoreoLab and Bangalore Biennale; and apprenticed for Shobana Jeyasingh Dance Company/UK.

Parijat shifted to New York City in 2004 and continued creating and performing with PDDC, which was presented by venues including Danspace Project, Tribeca Performing Arts Center, Queens Museum, Asia Society, National Centre for the Performing Arts (Mumbai), and The Dance Centre/Vancouver—around NYC, Houston, Chicago, Boston, SF Bay Area, Los Angeles, Vancouver, and all over India. The choreographic research she did 2000–2013 continues to impact her current projects and collaborations,

In 2013, Parijat’s work took an adventurous turn, as she forayed into site-specific and film work while on a Fulbright-Nehru Grant to India, creating improvisational scores and choreography at Indo-Islamic architectural sites in New Delhi, and at a Corbusier-designed building in Ahmedabad. She also paused the dance company, and set work on multiple ensembles of dancers, actors, musicians, and students in India and the U.S.

After returning from India in 2016, Parijat changed the group’s name to Parijata Dance Company to shift focus away from herself as an individual, and toward the concept of “parijata” a flowering tree native to South Asia, beloved in India, Nepal, and Bangladesh—that of connection with Earth, growth, transformation, blossoming.* She also started Dance In The Round, to bring dance to a wider community of people, beyond rarefied spaces of experimental dance, and to develop dance as a tool for healing and empowerment.

In 2023, after polling our community, we landed on Parijata Performance Projects, to reflect the ongoing interdisciplinarity of our work—which integrates movement, sound, music, text, and visual design. For more, see Past Works and Current Work.

*Parijat also recognizes the caste privilege reflected in her last name “Desai.” She has kept “Desai” as her last name to not hide this privilege, and considers herself a practicing Hindu. And she has been active in movements to dismantle caste apartheid, xenophobia, Islamophobia, and religious nationalism since 2000. She is choosing to remove it from the company name to create a more inclusive space for dance.