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A neuroscientist explains your brain on dance (it's wild!) As part of our upcoming production (just 6 days away!), artists and students dug deep into their learnings about dance and art to share with you. This week’s post by neuroscientist and Navatman member, Abha Rajbhandari - what surprising functions of the brain light up when we move our bodies? When the Sun Rises June 26-28 Alvin Ailey Citigroup Theater
 The brain is the organ that allows us to experience the world. It receives light, sound, rhythm, breath, touch, balance, and movement, and transforms them into perception, memory, emotion, and meaning. As a neuroscientist, I have studied the role of the brain in stress regulation for more than 15 years. But the effect of dance on the brain feels especially powerful. When we dance, the brain is not simply controlling the body. It is listening to the body, predicting the next movement, remembering patterns, adjusting balance, feeling rhythm, and expressing something that words often cannot hold. The brain’s ability to listen to bodily rhythms such as breath, heartbeat, posture, and inner sensation is called interoception. Dance is one of the most ancient human languages. Long before ideas were written down, human beings moved together in rhythm. We danced to celebrate, to grieve, to worship, to tell stories, to mark seasons, and to remember who we were as a community. I am learning that in classical traditions such as Bharatanatyam, dance is not only physical exercise. It is geometry, devotion, storytelling, discipline, rhythm, and emotion woven into the body. From a neuroscience perspective, Bharatanatyam is especially meaningful to me. As I prepare for the student showcase with my group, I am observing how much coordination this dance requires. The dancer must bring together footwork, posture, hand gestures, facial expression, breath, rhythm, music, and narrative. Everything has to be integrated. The torso remains stable while the limbs move with precision. The face expresses emotion while the feet keep rhythm. The hands tell a story while the body maintains balance. This means that Bharatanatyam trains not only movement, but also attention, memory, emotional expression, and interoception-brain’s ability to listen to the body. Modern neuroscience is beginning to explain why dance feels so deeply embodied. Dancing engages motor circuits that control movement, auditory circuits that process rhythm and music, vestibular systems that regulate balance, memory systems that store sequences, and emotional networks that give movement meaning. Unlike many forms of exercise, dance requires the brain to coordinate the body in relation to internal signals, external cues, music, space, and other people. It is truly a whole-brain and whole-body practice! This may be why dance and music are increasingly studied in neurological conditions. In Parkinson’s disease, where movement can become stiff, slow, or difficult to initiate, rhythm and dance can sometimes help the body move more fluidly. In Alzheimer’s disease and dementia, music and movement can sometimes bring back memory, emotion, and social connection, even when language and ordinary recall become difficult. Of course, dance does not cure these conditions. But it can offer a meaningful pathway for movement, expression, and care. In yoga and dance, interoception resembles dhārana: the training of attention toward a chosen object. In dance, the object of attention is not only the breath or a mantra, but the living body itself. A dancer learns to ask: How is my breath? Where is my balance? Am I ahead of the rhythm, or am I inside it? Is my body tense, or is it open and alive? This inner listening is not separate from mental health. The brain and body are in constant conversation. When we move rhythmically, breathe with awareness, and coordinate attention with action, we influence the autonomic nervous system, stress physiology, mood, and emotional regulation. This is one reason dance can reduce anxiety and depression. It allows the body to express, release, and reorganize what the mind may not be able to say. One of the most beautiful parts of preparing for this showcase has been the social connection. As a group, dance has allowed us to listen to one another, coordinate with one another, and move within a shared rhythm. In this sense, dance is not only individual expression. It is collective regulation. It teaches us how to belong to a rhythm larger than ourselves. Neuroscience is now catching up to what many cultures have known for centuries: movement is not separate from thought, and the body is not separate from the mind. Dance supports neuroplasticity because it asks the brain to keep learning. It supports emotional health because it gives feeling a rhythm and shape. It supports social connection because it brings people into synchrony. To dance, then, is not only to move. It is to remember with the body, to listen from within, and to transform rhythm into awareness. Dance reminds us that the brain does not live only inside the skull. It lives through the moving body. How beautiful it is to experience all of this as human beings! References: https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/31481910/ https://www.mdpi.com/1660-4601/18/21/11618 https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/37549216/ About this post This post is part of an ongoing series reflecting on cross-cultural community, ancestral memory, and the ways dance carries both joy and resistance. These stories are not separate from the work on stage. They ARE the work. When the Sun Rises brings these threads together in a live experience. Join us June 26–28 at Ailey Theater. About us
Navatman and Baila Society joined forces in 2024 for a uniquely New York City experience: a place where two women-led arts organizations based in the cultural traditions of Afro-Latinx arts (Salsa, Latin Hustle, Afro-Cuban) and Indian arts (Bharatanatyam, Kathak, Hindustani and Carnatic music) come together. In this shared space, we explore how the force of artists and students working together can promote, define, and create a sense of stability and strength, joy and love within communities at large - particularly through artistic endeavors.
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I was surprised to be invited.
Navatman's black box theater holds about fifty people, and I knew every seat would be filled. This was a family occasion, an intimate celebration, the kind of night that belongs to the people who have been there from the beginning. I have only known these girls for a year or two, since BAILA Society's residency at Navatman began. I am a guest in this space, still learning its rhythms. But they call me Ahtoy-didi. In Hindi, didi means big sister. And after every rehearsal, they honor me with Namaskar, a gesture of reverence that I receive with deep humility. It reminds me of manginge', the CHamoru practice of my own indigenous tradition, a greeting that moves toward the elder as an act of respect and recognition. These gestures exist in cultures that understand reciprocity and mutual respect: the young offer reverence for wisdom and experience, and the elders offer protection, guidance, and the responsibility of holding space for what comes next. In a culture where that reciprocity breaks down, where reverence becomes an opportunity for exploitation, these gestures have made me nervous. Here, under Sahi’s guidance though, they settle into something that feels ancient and correct, reassuring. They make me feel the weight of something real and utterly beautiful. Tonight, they performed. The studio that I have described to you in another post (overstuffed, noisy, perpetually repurposed) had been transformed again, this time into something that felt like a garden and a sanctuary at once. Candles lit the space with a warm glow. Strings of flowers hung from the ceiling, dangling photographs of the girls, adorable at every age. Sahi herself is baby-faced in many of them. There is something like a shrine with a photo of Sahi surrounded by her little cherubs, all making silly faces. She was in her early 20’s, already holding the vision that would eventually become all of this. There were samosas, chapatis, pakoras, kati rolls, and homemade chai served in tiny clay cups that guests collected neatly in a bin after drinking. Everything was saturated with color: teal, royal purple, magenta, sapphire, emerald. I was grateful I had dressed for the occasion. I am not well-versed in the complex and beautiful art of South Asian fashion, but I am a long-time admirer. The girls were generous with their compliments on my outfit, which I received with genuine gratitude. I told them it was only my second kurta (the first had been gifted to me by Sahi), and that maybe one day I will graduate to sari status. What the Junior Troupe built for their graduating friend was an act of devotion. They moved through both Kathak and Bharatanatyam, a rare dual fluency that most adult dancers never achieve, and they did it while telling two stories at once: the ancient ones their bodies have been trained to carry, and their own. The story of these particular girls, in this particular studio, growing up together under the particular grace of Sahi's mentorship. The older girls taught the younger ones their repertoire, passing on knowledge the way knowledge has always been passed on at its best, not as instruction, but as gift. They performed pieces they had admired from Navatman's professional company, work they had watched on YouTube for years, hoping quietly that one day they might get to inhabit it. They sang. They moved through stories about when they had first performed certain pieces, what was happening in their lives at that time, what the work had meant to them then and what it carries now. They built, in the space of one evening, a living archive of themselves. I cried for most of it. In my last post, I wrote about exhaustion, about how the conditions of our lives make it so hard to gather, how the freelancer misses rehearsal because they had to take the gig, how we arrive depleted and leave still owing. I wrote about adults too fragmented to show up fully for the work we love most. And then these children showed me something I needed to see. They had learned their parts. They had also learned ours. In When the Sun Rises, BAILA Society and Navatman are not just performing side by side. We are partnering, our bodies actually crossing over into each other's traditions, learning to move together in ways that require sustained presence and deep listening. The adults have been struggling with this, held back by the grinding reality of schedules that belong to whoever is paying us on any given day. The kids had already absorbed it. More than once, they have been the ones teaching the partnering back to us, patiently, because we have not been in the room enough to carry it in our bodies the way they do. And while we were out there surviving, they were here, preparing a show for their friend. I was inspired. I want to be careful about what I mean when I say the kids are leading us, because it would be easy to reach for the comfortable idea of kids being cute and innocent, and that is not what I witnessed tonight. These girls are not naive. They know exactly what world they are inheriting, and they hold that knowledge with a clarity that most adults have learned to soften or avoid. What makes them extraordinary is that their creativity has not yet been crowded out by the machinery of survival. They still have access to something that exhaustion quietly steals from us over time: the capacity to ask what something is truly for, to make beauty on purpose, to insist that how we do a thing matters as much as whether we finish it. Most of us learn, somewhere along the way, to stop asking those questions. We get so consumed with meeting our obligations that we forget to examine them. Coming to Navatman from the salsa world felt, at first, like stepping out of a current I hadn't known I was swimming in. In my career, I have spent enormous energy justifying our depth to others, to people of the dominant culture and those that internalize that hierarchy. Our dances are ancient, technically demanding, spiritually rooted, and historically layered in ways that most people who consume it only as entertainment will never fully appreciate. And yet in order to survive, we present it as something light and accessible, something you can buy for $20 and call it a night. At Navatman, no one asked us to justify anything. Their dance carries the word “classical” like a kind of armor. Even though they face their own version of what we face, the minority status, the underfunding, the art world's persistent indifference, they approached our collaboration with a simple and generous assumption: if our tradition is deep and sacred, yours must be too. What is your special thing? Tell us. Show us. We want to know. That kind of curiosity can only come from a place that has taught you, from the beginning, that other people's depth is real and worth encountering. Sahi taught them that. And they extended it to us as naturally. They don’t know another way. The mother of the graduating senior spoke after the performance. She had met Sahi before Navatman even had a permanent home, before the studio, before the Junior Troupe, before the black box theater. She brought her three-year-old daughter to be Sahi's very first student because she believed in the vision before the vision had a room to live in. She followed Sahi through all of it: the different iterations of the organization, the different studios, the particular difficulty that minority-owned arts businesses face in New York City when trying to simply hold onto space year after year. What she admired most, she said, was that Sahi had always taught tradition without imposing its limitations. The girls could play any instrument, dance both styles, inhabit the full range of what they were capable of, without ever being told that capability had a ceiling. She mentioned BAILA Society by name, that we were there too, teaching salsa, Afro-Cuban and Latin Hustle, woven into the world these children were being raised to move through with grace and curiosity. I was honored to be named. I was honored to be in that room. There was a moment near the end of the performance that I’m still thinking about. One of the girls lost her balance during a fantastic sequence of turns, and the girl behind her extended her hand at exactly the right moment, steadying her with such quiet precision that it looked choreographed. It was not choreographed. It was simply someone who knew her friend well enough to catch her without making a moment of it. Afterward, some of them went to their makeshift dressing room and cried. They felt they had fallen short. They regretted that it was their last performance together with their graduating friend, not yet understanding that the moment everyone in that room will remember is not the stumble but the hand. The reaching out, the graceful refusal to let someone fall alone, contained the entire argument for why we do any of this. They will understand it eventually. They may understand it sooner than most, because Sahi has been teaching them from the beginning that the journey holds more truth than the destination, that the relationships forged in the process outlast the performance itself, that what we build together is always more durable than what we achieve alone. Look up in our studio and you will find a disco ball, hung there by Sahi to honor Latin Hustle, to say without saying it that our tradition lives here too and deserves its own light. Beneath it, on any given day, you will find Bharatanatyam bells and conga drums, gymnastics rings and a book cart, a futon and a massage table and rows of shoes at the door and children who have learned both sides of a partnering sequence while the adults were too depleted to be present. The system that depletes us is not accidental. It wants us too tired to gather, too consumed with meeting our obligations to ask what we are meeting them for, too broken to discover what becomes possible when people like us get in a room together. And yet, when we watch these children, we know instantly that we are inspired. We know what we hope for them. Tonight, they performed a program they built themselves about love and time, about admiration and the passing of knowledge, about sisterhood and the particular hope of people who understand that what they are inheriting is both broken and worth fighting for. They did all of this because someone gave them a room, a tradition, and the foundational belief that they were worth taking seriously. That belief is what When the Sun Rises is also reaching toward. We are making something for everyone who needs to be reminded that their culture is sacred, that their joy has always been a form of resistance, that the hand extended at the right moment, quietly, gracefully, as if it were always part of the dance, is what holds everything together. The children are leading us there. Join us. When the Sun Rises — June 26–28 | Alvin Ailey Citigroup Theater, New York City Written by Ahoty Juliana When productivity becomes a trap, art becomes an act of rebellion.
Let’s be honest... When you’re planning your monthly budget, “dance show” isn’t going to be on the top of your list. You’ve got bills to pay and an endless cycle of daily stress to navigate. But this is more than just a dance show. It is a mission for our collective sanity. If you are feeling burnt out by a world that treats people like cogs in a machine, this is for you. Trapped in the machine Living in a hyper-competitive late-stage capitalist culture where time is money, we are conditioned to believe that your worth equals what you produce. Chase commercial trends. Feel guilty to indulge in rest and leisure. Everything has a price tag and everyone is stressed. Disconnected from nature, from community, from ourselves.  People over profit We are resisting the machine by throwing out the script. You already know our philosophy sessions - about viewing each other as complete human beings; about connecting beyond the stage; about building friendships and breaking down barriers. Thus, this shared community project, where the process matters as much as the final performance. Step out of the grind. Stand with us.When you support this project, you’re not just paying for “entertainment”. You are funding a sanctuary for:
We can’t change the system overnight, but we can choose actively where to invest our energy and support. About this post This post is part of an ongoing series reflecting on cross-cultural community, ancestral memory, and the ways dance carries both joy and resistance. These stories are not separate from the work on stage. They ARE the work. When the Sun Rises brings these threads together in a live experience. Join us June 26–28 at Ailey Theater. About us
Navatman and Baila Society joined forces in 2024 for a uniquely New York City experience: a place where two women-led arts organizations based in the cultural traditions of Afro-Latinx arts (Salsa, Latin Hustle, Afro-Cuban) and Indian arts (Bharatanatyam, Kathak, Hindustani and Carnatic music) come together. In this shared space, we explore how the force of artists and students working together can promote, define, and create a sense of stability and strength, joy and love within communities at large - particularly through artistic endeavors. Written by Lavanya Jagirdhar |
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June 2026
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