Body as Archive
Choreographer · Filmmaker · Performer · Los Angeles
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Choreographer · Filmmaker · Performer · Los Angeles
Rishi Sharma is a Los Angeles-based choreographer, filmmaker, performer, and educator currently pursuing a dual MFA in Choreography and Film/Video at the California Institute of the Arts. His work operates in the space between ritual and rupture — drawing from a foundation in Mayurbhanj Chhau, a centuries-old Indian martial dance form, and fusing it with contemporary movement vocabularies.
A Top 12 finalist on So You Think You Can Dance India, Rishi has since shaped movement for Bollywood cinema — choreographing for films including Shamshera with Ranbir Kapoor, Prithviraj with Akshay Kumar, and The Archies. His work moves between myth and memory, spectacle and stillness.
As Artistic Director of CentreStage Dance Company, he continues to bridge tradition and experiment, creating work that excavates the ancient through a radically modern lens.
Los Angeles, 2024
“The body remembers what history forgets.”
— Rishi Sharma
“Strength is not the opposite of softness. It is what allows it.”
Flow and Fortitude is a research-driven movement system developed at CalArts, situated in the space between structure and release—where control dissolves into responsiveness, and technique becomes a site of transformation. Rather than treating the body as something to be perfected, the practice understands it as a field of negotiation: between force and fluidity, rhythm and interruption, intention and instinct.
Drawing from the martial vocabulary of Mayurbhanj Chhau, weapon-based movement, and animal dynamics, the course reframes combat as choreography. The weapon becomes an extension of line and attention; the body cycles through states of attack, suspension, collapse, and recovery—where each transition carries expressive weight.
These principles intersect with contemporary floor work, improvisational systems, dramaturgy, and somatic awareness, forming an interdisciplinary framework where movement is both physical and conceptual. What emerges is not repetition, but adaptive intelligence—a body that listens, recalibrates, and redefines form in real time.
By positioning non-Western movement vocabularies as sites of inquiry rather than fusion, the work engages broader questions of authorship, embodiment, and cultural translation within contemporary performance.
Flow and Fortitude operates as both pedagogy and practice—an evolving methodology grounded in rigor, yet open to rupture.
For collaborations, commissions, workshops, and inquiries. Every conversation begins a new choreography.
