Contemporary & Dance-Theatre
Alongside the classical repertoire, Sanjib works in a contemporary register: cross-cultural collaboration, movement direction, and dance-theatre that carry the grammar of Manipuri dance — its rounded line, its devotional weight — into new forms and new rooms.
Two traditions, one language of the sacred
With the Duffy Liturgical Dance Company in Cleveland, Sanjib brought Manipuri classical dance into dialogue with African-American liturgical movement — two devotional vocabularies finding a shared language of worship in motion.
The work grew out of the Cleveland Foundation's Creative Fusion residency and the Indo-Afro-American Dance Project, where classical form met a wholly different lineage without either giving up its own voice.
Inherited grammar, present feeling
Sanjib's contemporary work sits at the meeting point of an ancient vocabulary and the present moment — an interest shaped early by the choreographers Manjusri Chaki-Sircar and Mamata Shankar, who reimagined classical Indian dance for the contemporary stage.
He carries this into intensives and teaching, including a contemporary dance intensive at the University of Alaska, and into commissions that ask the classical body to speak in a new idiom.
