beyond policy lab 6
The Spin that Bridges Stillness and Movement: A Live Lab for Kathak Dancers on AI and the Embodied Intelligence of Storytelling in Motion
The founder of the Devaniya Dance School, Chennai, Jigyasa Giri, and her students Avani Giri, Avani Maroo, Preya Mani, and Priya George Lakshman participated in Lab 6, bringing their wisdom as kathak dancers, teachers, and practitioners. Founded by Kathak exponent Jigyasa Giri, the school began in Chennai in 2001, and continues to nurture education and immersion in Kathak with a focus on practical and theoretical knowledge.
The group began with a brief introduction reflecting on what their practice of Kathak taught them about power and surrender.
Jigyasa Giri recognized that power and surrender are the same, and operate in the same sense of balance. Without surrender, you cannot execute power mindfully, and without power, you cannot understand the importance and depth of surrender. They go hand in glove, and remain a pair of opposites that must co-exist for balance.
Avani Maroo noted that some measure of discipline is essential to bring power into existence. This includes the discipline to repeat something over and over again, be that a certain learning, a choreography, or a way of performing that you embody. From that point comes surrender, because the learning is entrenched in your system enough for you to surrender to it truly. That way, power and surrender are two sides to the same coin. There is also a measure of responsibility in both, because power is not just about the capacity or ability you have, but also about how you choose to execute, perform, and demonstrate it. Surrender emerges from the ability to hold that power mindfully.
Avani Giri recognized that the ability to both hold power and surrender is about the ability to surrender yourself to your teacher, your artform, your fellow performers, and all the while to challenge yourself to be a better version of yourself. We all lead different lives and different tracks within those lives that we cannot be the same people in all these spaces. The ability to power yourself to be all the different people you are, and to surrender to the ethos and the setting in which you are called upon to be a different person, then work together.
Preya Mani learned from abhinaya that embodying a character does not mean losing oneself, as it is a matter of power to know where to let go and surrender to the role you are playing. It required understanding the character's emotions, strengths and flaws without losing awareness of oneself as a performer. This role also showed that power without self awareness can be destructive, and that true responsibility comes from understanding the impact of one's choices on others and on one’s surroundings and being accountable for the impact of it.
Naming and Framing the Problem
Inviting the group to work as knowledge holders in this session, rather than as policymakers, the reflection shifted toward recognizing the promises and perils of AI as a tool. On the one hand, the group recognized that there are challenges with the emergence of AI that include environmental harm, discrimination, hallucinations and false information, and untrammelled use that produces harm. The difficult impact of AI the group noticed most was the reduction in attention spans, the inner sense of romance in navigating the world, and the ability to exercise nuance. The culture of instant gratification that is fuelled now by AI has led to people demanding speed over patience, and in many ways, suppresses the appetite for deep and reflective thinking. It has also flattened ideas into absolutes that room for nuance seems nearly, if not entirely, lost.
On the other hand, they also recognized it as a tool that has the potential to level the field by making education and skills-training more easily accessible. They expressed a measure of curiosity about the many ways in which AI can be more beneficial to people. As artists, the group noted that AI has been useful in offering speedy support to handle things like admin, quick research that is then carefully verified, designing, and scheduling, while the artist’s focus remains on their artform without competing demands on their time. The group also noted that AI has been particularly helpful for communities that are historically not native speakers of English but are expected to conform to a system that largely operates in and demands proficiency in the language.
Holding these tensions gently, much like in their Kathak practice, the group noted that these promises and perils represent a vital call to action: Tending to our roots, because the tree of life is doddering right now. Learn, root yourself, and branch out while keeping your roots strong. This could look like returning to community and reflecting together, leaning on your teacher, returning to the foundational wisdom of your field of work or interest, and reflecting and introspecting as a regular, ongoing exercise in pursuit of personal growth.
With this in place, the group reflected on three key questions:
Kathak has always been a form that holds contradiction — Hindu and Mughal, devotional and courtly, geometric and lyrical, surrender and control. What does that capacity to hold contradiction without resolving it know about how governance should handle the genuine tensions in AI that cannot be resolved by choosing one value over another?
2. Your form has survived colonisation, social stigma, and the politics of revival — and it has survived not by becoming something else but by being held in the bodies of specific people in specific lineages who refused to let it die. What does that survival know about protecting knowledge in the age of AI?
3. Kathak survived because people whose personhood was not valued held its knowledge in their bodies. What does governance look like if it requires that the protection of knowledge and the protection of the people who hold that knowledge are inseparable — that you cannot extract one without the other?
Creating a Repository of Wisdom
Each member in the group was invited to share one concept, practice, principle, or embodied understanding from their practice of Kathak that speaks to governance. The themes that emerged were:
The basic structure of kathak, which is set with taal, laya, gati. These are the core parameters that simply cannot be removed from the artform. These are lessons from nature.
The taal is not a cage but the condition of possibility for everything that happens within it.
Starting and arriving exactly on the sam from an unexpected direction, knows centres the relationship between rule and improvisation, between the system and the intelligence that navigates it
The idea that the entire universe is our teacher and we have gathered knowledge from it. When the rhythm of the universe is disrupted, it throws the whole of creation into chaos.
Balance is the answer to everything in Kathak and beyond. The assumption of ownership and claiming that “we create” is idiocy, as we are but only a small speck in a large universe. The only course is to stay aligned with nature and that means balance. We tip the balance any one way and we’re in trouble.
The Teacher-Student Relationship, which denotes patience and discipline in learning, alongside responsibility toward the knowledge we are gaining.
Learning structure in order to break free with creativity and fluidity.
Building a Container for Governance
The group began with a deep reflection on how Kathak has the capacity to hold the tension of the opposites by recognizing its capacity to embody the universe in itself. By centering cyclical time and spatial mapping, Kathak brings the universe to life through sacred geometry that makes space for everything to exist without having to bear the burden of resolution. The group noted that the sun does not resolve the moon, the moon does not resolve its phases, the ant does not resolve being stamped upon, and the food chain does not resolve itself. By recognizing ourselves as mini universes, Kathak invites us to sit with our own thoughts that may contradict each other, to reflect on ourselves by delving within, and to welcome the multitudes we hold within ourselves as inherent in our by the very condition of being human. This inherent nature of Kathak offers a powerful value for governance to draw from, which is that the complexity of life in a deeply connected society and world should not be flattened into an abstract datapoint that reduces a whole human being to one aspect of themselves.
Kathak’s propensity to survive everything from colonialism to social stigma also brought forth a powerful insight for governance. THe group reflected on how Kathak has endured as an orally transmitted artform that has not been reduced into a rigid container. Handed down generation to generation, it has gone through the vagrancies of historical change and has a rugged history in itself - where it has got bashed up and still endured through it to survive as it is. This journey highlights the importance of decentralized protection and preservation of the core knowledge alongside localised care-driven stewardship, while taking care to preserve the core from any form of external force, be that stigmatization, policing, erasure, or appropriation.
The group also reflected on how Kathak requires the body to remain its natural self without having to take on a different position to perform the dance itself. It is also fluid in the sense that the core principles offer tremendous room for lyrical, musical, and story-driven evolution. This non-restrictive, boundless, flexible, and fluid nature of Kathak offers a meaningful counter to algorithmic enclosure and data extraction, as it helps us see that communities must retain sovereignty over their data and cultural expressions.
Responsibility and accountability are critical to the entire AI life cycle. Drawing from abhinaya, or the art of presenting dramatic action silently through gestures and expressions, the group noted that power without self-awareness can be destructive. This self-awareness extends to understanding the impact one has on human and non-human others, and being responsible enough to conduct oneself in ways that don’t cause such harm, and accountable for the harm that ensues regardless of one’s best intentions. AI without this self-awareness is dangerous: As a machine, this self-awareness is really for the humans that build, use, and govern AI to bring into the dynamic.
While emerging technologies have the potential to unlock greater potential, level the playing ground, and empower where there has been little access and successful inclusion, these developments cannot arrive at the cost of the communities it is intended to support. Drawing from the teacher-student tradition that is foundational to the transmission and preservation of Kathak as an artform and a knowledge stream, the group reflected on how benefits must be shared more meaningfully with a sense of care and responsibility. At its heart, the group noted that Kathak's story is one of dynamic equilibrium, as there is a balance between adaptation and preservation of its core identity. This offers a meaningful value for governance, in the form of balance between care and growth, where benefits are shared and harms are minimised.
The group also reflected on the importance of respecting the legacies of knowledge and the vital role of a teacher in both, passing it on to the taught and in nurturing the learning journey. Drawing from this, the group offered two ideas for governance. First, respecting the legacy of knowledge goes beyond a tokenistic mention of the source or name-dropping the author, to a more wholesome and respectful engagement with it. This means that the sources of knowledge and the wisdom it offers cannot be extracted for use to train a model, but should rather be respected and cared for without exploitation. Second, turning to a teacher’s wisdom is a path to keeping knowledge grounded and cared for, which means that reflection and growth emerge from meaningfully engaging with the knowledge and building dialogue and community around it.