Kaustavi Sarkar & Marc Manack 
Kaustavi Sarkar & Marc Manack, photo by Toby Shearer
Presented by architecture professor Marc Manack and visiting dance professor Kaustavi Sarkar, “Odissi Anima” is a conversation between architecture and dance in an interdisciplinary collaboration using digital technology. It explores the architectural and choreographic crafting of movement and space through technological projections and objects. Odissi is an Indian classical dance form that travels globally in high-art concert venues as well as in South Asian diasporic festivals. Anima, meaning soul or life, is reconceived as technological reconfigurations of history in ways that reveal to life the marginalized histories of the Maharis or the temple-dancers.
Dr. Kaustavi Sarkar, an NEA recipient, is an Assistant Professor of Dance at the University of North Carolina in Charlotte. As Artistic Director of Kaustavi Movement Center, an India-based organization dedicated to feminist and queer research and pedagogy in Indian classical dance praxis, she employs entrepreneurial measures for building a dance fraternity. Her choreography and scholarship has been featured in American College Dance Association Conference, Dance Studies Association, World Dance Alliance, and Odissi International. Her monograph Dance, Technology, Social Justice in review with McFarland Publishers presents a critical cultural take on dance technique as a technology of social justice. Her research interests include Practice-as-Research, religious studies, digital humanities, choreographic research, and queer theory. Her performance and practice feature in her book project Shaping S-Curves under review by University of North Carolina Press. She is working on a piece called The Impossible Romance with choreographer Maya Kulkarni that will premiere in NYC on May 7, 2022.
Marc Manack AIA NCARB is an architect, an associate professor at the UNC Charlotte School of Architecture, and founding principal of the architecture and design practice SILO AR+D. His professional design work and creative practice have been recognized nationally and internationally in numerous publications, exhibitions, and design awards. In 2016, Manack was selected as an Emerging Voice by The Architectural League of New York, a competition that recognizes North American individuals and firms with distinct design voices and significant bodies of realized work. In 2018, SILO AR+D was recognized as a Next Progessive by Architect Magazine. Manack’s research focuses on the relationship between design processes, project delivery, and organizations of practice. He is interested in how that relationship is affected by emerging cultural and technological phenomena, leading to advanced possibilities for expression and new definitions for practice in architecture. He has taught previously at the University of Arkansas Fay Jones School of Architecture, Kent State University College of Architecture and Environmental Design, and at Ohio State University’s Austin E. Knowlton School of Architecture, from where he is also a graduate.
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