Theiyā Arts Dance Collective (TADC)
Theiyā Arts Dance Collective (TADC) is the South Asian contemporary dance company of Theiyā Arts. Established in 2020, we are a collective of Edinburgh-based South Asian dance artists creating work that engages the contemporary world through South Asian arts vocabularies—without reducing those forms to spectacle, exotic, or “heritage-only” framing.
Our choreographic practice is decolonial in intent and method: we centre lived experience, cultural integrity, and critical context, while questioning who gets to be seen, how South Asian bodies are read, and what kinds of stories are legitimised on stage. Our work sits between contemporary and classical practice, and often draws on artistic practice as research. We make work for varied audience contexts—public, community, diaspora, and research—often bridging performance with dialogue, participation, and arts-led research.
Body of Work
The Vertigo Project (ongoing)
Vertigo is an in-development strand of work that includes a commissioned dance film, community engagement sessions, and arts-led research. Alongside creating the film, we are contributing to a practice-based pedagogical framework for facilitating movement with people who experience vertigo and balance issues—grounded in lived experience, shaped through community sessions, and attentive to access.
The Ticking Clock (2022 - 2024)
A South Asian contemporary-classical dance production centred on the urgency of climate change. Inspired by the Climate Clock, the work uses the countdown as a choreographic driver, drawing from South Asian movement archives often used to depict the natural world. The process is research-led, shaped by artists’ cultural, historical, and personal relationships to nature, and invites audiences into an introspective reckoning with environmental change.
Daughters of the Earth (ongoing)
A foundational collaboration marking the beginning of the collective’s shared language. We held the multiplicity of our diverse dance styles close while asking how a collaboration can remain holistic—honouring individual values, lineages, and aesthetics. The work explores joy, flow, and sisterhood as threads that can hold collective practice.
Maiden | Mother | Whore (ongoing)
An interdisciplinary, interactive, mixed-media performance/exhibition exploring the complex relationships between women, social structures, health and social policies, and institutions.
Drawing on women’s embodied experiences and narratives, the work examines tensions between individual and collective life, agency and power, and patterns of oppression and resistance through a transnational intersectional feminist lens.
The Story I see (2021-2022)
A South Asian contemporary-classical dance production centred on the urgency of climate change. Inspired by the Climate Clock, the work uses the countdown as a choreographic driver, drawing from South Asian movement archives often used to depict the natural world. The process is research-led, shaped by artists’ cultural, historical, and personal relationships to nature, and invites audiences into an introspective reckoning with environmental change.
Collaborative Projects
Decolonial representation - We challenge narrow and exoticised representations of South Asian arts by holding complexity: multiple lineages, migration histories, languages, class/caste realities, and hybrid cultural lives. Our work is rooted in context, not simplification.
Arts as activism - We use choreography as a way to think publicly, bringing socio-political questions into the room through embodiment, rhythm, and form. We don’t make “issue work” for easy answers; we make work that can hold contradiction, tension, and nuance.
Lived experience as source - Our processes draw from embodied narratives and everyday realities - how people move through institutions, relationships, health, belonging, and power. This keeps the work accountable to the present, not only to tradition.
Research-connected practice - We develop work through artistic practice as research, and collaborate with academic and community partners where it supports deeper inquiry and ethical engagement.
For commissions, partnerships, research collaborations, and touring conversations