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This weekend, The Ringling’s Art of Performance season will open with performances of Bijayini Satpathy’s contemporary classical piece, Doha, on October 18 and 19. Satpathy, an internationally recognized master of Odissi, the oldest surviving classical dance of India, created Doha over the course of an artist residency at the Metropolitan Museum of Art. 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. Below is an excerpt from the full Q&A interview that will be in the December 2025 issue of SRQ Magazine.

SRQ: What is Doha and how did the performance come to be?

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 residency 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. 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.

SRQ: In creating Doha, what were some of the questions that you had surrounding the Odissi dance form?

Satpathy: 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?

October 18-19, Historic Asolo Theater at The Ringling, 5401 Bay Shore Rd, Sarasota, 3423, 941-630-7399

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