My interest in movement and writing coalesces in my pedagogic practice. My work has constantly explored what ’embodied practice’ means, and what its shifting boundaries might be, arriving at this embodiment in various forms and spaces, most particularly, text. I work with children and adults to build learning environments that are enabling, non-hierarchical, and driven by critical thinking and questioning. I am open to teaching and mentoring engagements. Please get in touch using the contact form if you have questions.
Key teaching experience includes:
Ashoka University (2018- )
– Performance as Protest (2018), co-taught with Mandeep Raikhy
– The Body and the Performative (2019), co-taught with Mandeep Raikhy
– Odissi (2020)
– Performance as Resistance (2021)
– Dance 101 (2021)
– The Body and the Performative, co-taught with Mandeep Raikhy (Monsoon 2022)
Just Chill: Finding Rest as Resistance | Elective | Kamla Raheja Vidyanidhi School of Architecture, Mumbai
February 2023
Mumbai is known for its frenetic pace: in how our bodies rush into local trains and buses and across roads, and also in a filmic imagination of the city as a blur that is constantly in motion. This elective uses ideas from daily movement and performance to begin to think about what it means for the body to rest and ‘chill’ in Mumbai. How do people in the city, in public spaces, find comfort, rest, and relaxation, even as they negotiate everything else happening in that space. What does rest/ aaram even mean? Can it mean different things to different people, to different bodies in different spaces?
In Dance | Dance Writing Workshop at Christ University, Bengaluru April 2022
This was a workshop within the framework of the Prakriti Excellence in Contemporary Dance Awards, organised by the Prakriti Foundation. Its participants were students from the media studies discipline and allied departments at Christ University.
Read + Write Dance
This is a three-month independent course I offer occasionally. Please check with me to learn when this is being offered next. Shorter course durations are also possible.
Read+Write Dance, a 60 hour course conducted over three months, will offer you the tools you need to deepen your understanding of dance. This is not just a dance criticism course. It is as fundamental as the title suggests – you’re going to be reading and writing dance – critically unpacking how you see or watch dance, and thus, how you interpret it.
The course, designed and facilitated by Ranjana Dave, will address both larger historical and critical trajectories that frame dance, and the tools of the trade – the practical and day-to-day implementations of this knowledge – like talking about your own work or writing performance synopses, framing grant proposals and research projects, designing research projects, writing for the public – on social media platforms/print and online publications, and teaching students in different contexts – in dance class, in schools and universities, and more.
Previously offered in 2021 and 2022.
MA in Performance Practice (Dance), School of Culture and Creative Expressions, Ambedkar University Delhi (2018-2020)
Courses I helped develop/ taught on include Awareness Observation Description: Reading and Writing Dance, Dance Histories, Ecologies and Identities, Embodied Practice and Practice in Context.
Nrityagram (Village Outreach programme, 2015-16)
KRVIA, Mumbai (2013-14)