Love language

For immigrants, love is an indulgence. Bharatanatyam has long told stories of romance, but Love Language asks a different question: how does the beloved heroine look when she is far from the home she knows?

The work pays homage to the Bharatanatyam repertoire, drawing on stories of immigrant belonging to explore how people lean on one another after building new lives in an unfamiliar world: a shared meal, a borrowed hobby, another person’s version of home slowly becoming one’s own.

Built on the varnam, the Bharatanatyam and Carnatic framework long considered the form’s most demanding piece, the performance carries a story arc as complicated as distance itself. Hereditary dancers in South India, the form’s progenitors, most often explored romantic love through the varnam. “Love Language” nods to that tradition while filling a gap rarely addressed within it: the search for love and commonality in a foreign land, as Indian Americans.