Bijayini Satpathy wants us to listen. To the earth, to the universe and to the questions that come to our minds in the times of stillness. It’s part of why Satpathy, an internationally recognized master of Odissi, the oldest surviving classical dance of India, created Doha, the most groundbreaking work of her career. In Doha, Satpathy seeks to expand the physical vocabulary of Odissi, while challenging the traditional theistic depictions that permeate the art form and replacing ideas of “prayer” and “play” with stillness, meditation and exaltation. Satpathy bared her soul, her decades of dance experience and her willingness to push the boundaries of her art form at the Historic Asolo Theater as the opener of The Ringling's  Art of Performance season. 

What is Doha, and how did the performance come to be?  BIJAYINI SATPATHY I have been working at expanding the training and performance vocabulary of Odissi for a very long time and this work is where I was the most experimental. Because it was an artist-in-residence program, I considered this as a study more than a performance or a statement. I had lots of questions surrounding Odissi—I’ve been training in this medium for 45 years—so I gathered all of those questions into a practical investigation of the form, addressing them in various cultural setups in the Metropolitan Museum of Art (MET). Finally, after I’d created four space-specific works, I took essential ideas from each one of them and put them together into this piece called Doha. It has only been performed twice—first at the MET, where I created the work as the culmination of my one and a half year artist residency there, and then again in April 2025 in India. Sarasota will be the first touring destination of Doha. 

In creating Doha, what were some of the questions that you had surrounding the Odissi dance form?Odissi is a very regional art form. It comes from the state of Odisha in East India and is very specifically connected to the local culture. It comes from the language, the way language is composed in prose and poetry, the way language induces emotion in real life; as well as the literature, architecture and all kinds of design ideas that exist in the land of Odisha. It is also part of the worship rituals in the temples of Odisha and has been given the status of one of the national dance forms of India. My questions were about the regionality of Odissi—is Odissi only regional? Does it exist just in the specific aspects of its connection to Odisha, the land where it originated, or is it a global movement language? 

How did the environment of the MET help answer those questions? I deliberately chose not to work within the Indian Gallery, because that would’ve been juxtaposing my Odissi against other aspects of Indian or Odisha backgrounds. I chose the Islamic Wing, which is as far away from Odissi dance as you can get. I chose the Astor Chinese Garden Court from the Ming dynasty. I chose the American Contemporary Art gallery and a 12th-century chapter house where Christian monks gathered. I wanted to connect to the ideas that are housed within those spaces, not only in terms of religious concepts, but in terms of design and the essence of each space. The chapter house is about prayer, meditation and finding focus within. In the Islamic Wing, I address the non-figurative design of the space, where simple designs multiply to become larger, complex designs. In the Astor Chinese Court, I was thinking about the philosophical reflections that we make as humans. In the
Contemporary Art Gallery, I was especially struck by a drape painting by Sam Gilliam, which is a riot of colors and
has a very free design created with a sense of abandon. By placing these questions against other cultures and creating work that speaks of and with those other cultures, I felt like I investigated the universal aspect of Odissi.

What was the physical process of choreographing Doha?  Everything is an embodied trial and error process. Odissi has a certain structure, a certain vocabulary and repertoire that progresses and culminates in a specific way. The music is specific to the dance form as well, so when an unfamiliar tradition of music is played, I am thrown off. The only way to respond to something, however, is to move with it. If there are lyrics, what do they mean to me? I respond to everything through who I am as a mover and a dancer—live the questions, I say, instead of trying to find the answers. Odissi sits in my body and my psyche in a certain way. When creating Doha, I tried to feel and center these movements in a different part of my body, keeping in mind the new surroundings that I’m responding to. It’s about breaking familiar patterns and throwing myself into uncomfortable ways of moving within the Odissi vocabulary. For 45 years, I have stuck to the traditional way of dancing. Before I die, I want to complete as much of the search that is within myself as possible.

How does Doha explore the dichotomy between prayer and play? Doha came together after a long year of the pandemic, in which everybody was forced into some sort of reflective meditation. I lost my father at the end of 2020, which was a very difficult month for myself and all of my siblings. I remember something silly happened, however, and we all laughed for some reason or another—I caught myself thinking, how can I laugh at a time like this? So there was this meditative idea that I had, this inner stillness that I’d been searching for, combined with the resilience of the soul. It laughs, it plays even amidst difficult times. It triggered my thought that soul sustenance is found both in stillness and quiet and in wonder and play. The soul is like a child—it can become very quiet and ask questions of the mind, which leads us to a point of stillness that I call prayer. I felt like we all needed to quiet down and then we needed to play. Everything that I have done in dance fits into these two categories, of praying or playing. It’s either romancing the idea of wonder or trying to be still and connect oneself with the larger universe. Basically, I took these two ideas of pray and play and expanded Doha, taking movement, vocabulary and the ideas that I’d worked with in the four spaces at the MET.

What is the meaning behind the name Doha?  Doha means two lines in a couplet of poetry, by 18th-century Urdu poet Mir Taqi Mir. Mir Taqi Mir says, “Even if you breathe, breathe ever so gently,” for the cosmos are as fragile as a glass workshop. The fragility of the universe was a driving force behind the creation of Doha. Everything was hunky dory and then a pandemic happened and everything crumbled. Everything became very personal at that point, my dad’s death, how life carried on, the resilience of the soul and how isolated we all became during the pandemic. All of that is reflected in Doha. 

How does Doha break away from the physical presentation of traditional Odissi dance? How the performance is presented also pushes the boundaries of Odissi. Odissi is always presented in segments—one choreography after another fills up an hour. Doha is one hour of me never leaving the stage, which I’ve never done before. Odissi music and dance also operates at a medium speed and creates constant isolation between the upper and lower body. There is a lot of geometric precision with the arms and legs, there is always a spiral happening in space.

I wanted the beginning of the performance to be slower than slow, which my body is not used to. Moving that slow took me to a place of stillness and reflection, where, in turn, those movements become prayer. There are no words or gestures that bring me to this sense of prayer, but rather being still in certain contours of the body feels like prayer, before breaking into episodes and fragments. The idea of fragments came from the poet Sappho, that even fragments of thoughts can be pulled together to show one intense emotion. So then I’m creating fragments of the ideas of play, in different spaces. As I move from one space to another, the music, which has a continuity and logic to it, begins to change until it turns into a frenzy, building towards the sense of wonder of the cosmos and how fragile everything truly is—urging the audience to be quiet, listen and breathe deeply without disturbing it.

It sounds like Doha is a call to reconnect with yourself amidst chaos. When I first performed Doha, it was quite emotional for me. It was in the Grace Rainey Rodgers Auditorium, at the MET, which seats 700 people, and it was a full house. I could feel every single person there, I felt very strongly connected to every person in the audience. Since then, it’s become a search for me—how can I connect with every single person without words, just by moving. I want to stay connected for the entire hour with every person there. In this world where there are so many fractions and fragmentations, there are so many barriers and boundaries, I feel like it’s a very powerful thing to feel one another and be with one another. I didn’t know that I was searching for this feeling, but to be still for one hour with everybody in the room was a big gift that came from the performance.