Duniya Dance and Drum, and Ghadar Geet

Intro Music by Soham Shiva

Lalita du Perron: Today, I am joined on the SASSPOD by Joti Singh, who run Duniya Dance Company, Duniya Dance and Drama, I always get this wrong. Okay, you can correct me later, Jyoti. And Jyoti was the, one of the main organizers and star performers of Ghadar Geet, which was presented at Stanford, in February, and we're going to talk about Joti herself, about the company, the dance. 

Lalita du Perron: company, and about Ghadar Geet. Joti, welcome.

Joti Singh (she/her): Thank you so much for having me.

Lalita du Perron: This is so exciting, I'm such a fan of yours, I'm fangirling. The audience, you can't see it because we're doing audio only, but I'm fangirling hard.

Lalita du Perron: Tell us about you, and what got you int o doing dance.

Joti Singh (she/her): Hmm. Yeah, so I grew up in the southern part of the United States, in Georgia, to be specific, right outside of Atlanta… right outside of Atlanta. Two parents who immigrated to the United States from Punjab in the 1970s.

Joti Singh (she/her): And I grew up in a place where there were not very many other daisies around me. One thing my parents did to connect us to Punjabi culture was to take us

Joti Singh (she/her): every weekend, we would go meet the other daisies at… or the other Punjabis, more specifically, Punjabi Sikh, to be even more specific, at Georgia Tech University, and we would be in a room there, and the uncles and aunties would be teaching us Giddha and Pangrada to… to learn for some future performance, for a Busaki festival.

Joti Singh (she/her): At some hall that they rented. So, that was kind of my introduction to dance, and never in my parents' wildest dreams did they think, like, this will lead to a career, nor is that what they would have wanted, but…

Joti Singh (she/her): That was… that was the route, and I did some ballet growing up, but I did it for a very short amount of time, because it was not for me. And I did other things like gymnastics and tennis,

Joti Singh (she/her): And eventually, I kind of… the feeling of wanting to conform and be like the other kids in my school, overrode the… the, you know, desire to dance with my community, so I… I stopped doing it,

Joti Singh (she/her): And as I got older, and…

Joti Singh (she/her): didn't dance for quite a while. I mean, I think all through high school, and I didn't have any connection to dance at all, other than, you know, if we had a party or someone's wedding, you know, we might dance on the dance floor with everybody else. Then I went to college in Portland, Oregon. I did my undergrad at Reed College.

Lalita du Perron: Okay, great.

Joti Singh (she/her): They have a very, robust, PE requirement. This is the most, like, pedestrian, boring answer ever, but, so you, you know, because you're doing so much reading and so much, you know, academic work, they have, you know, they want to balance it with

Joti Singh (she/her): making sure the students are doing some kind of physical activity, so…

Joti Singh (she/her): they offered a West African dance class at Reed, so I thought, okay, let me try this. Some of my friends were doing it, sounds like fun. And I got really interested in it, and just started a deep dive into dance from Guinea, West Africa. And that sort of led me back to my origins in Punjabi dances, and after…

Joti Singh (she/her): after college, I started to get more interested in

Joti Singh (she/her): you know, oh, like, I do have a dance practice, and what was that dance practice? And simultaneously, Punjabi music was sort of making its way into… I don't want to say mainstream, seems like overstating it, but there were some…

Lalita du Perron: Abby MC days, where that.

Joti Singh (she/her): Yes.

Lalita du Perron: Yes, exactly.

Joti Singh (she/her): Jay-Z, at least Jay-Z knew about, you know, Punjabi music, so,

Joti Singh (she/her): It kind of simultaneously, you know, it coincided with that… that moment, and, fast forward, I moved to… I moved to the Bay Area, I did my, master's degree at UC Berkeley in the South Asian Studies Department, and I did my research on how dance

Joti Singh (she/her): Ties to post-independence.

Joti Singh (she/her): India, post-independence, kind of comparing it with other movements across the world, primarily looking at dance from Guinea as well, and how it became a way to articulate the identity of a newly born nation after independence.

Joti Singh (she/her): And I was just writing about dance, and researching dance, and I thought.

Joti Singh (she/her): And meanwhile, studying West African dance, but I thought, okay, why don't I, like, actually, I can embody this.

Lalita du Perron: So then I moved to the Bay Area. I did a master's degree in the South Asian Studies Department at UC Berkeley.

Joti Singh (she/her): And I was doing research on how dance becomes a way to articulate a cultural identity after independence. Looking at India and also comparing

Joti Singh (she/her): that with Guinea and just how dance is a form of…

Joti Singh (she/her): of bringing people together and, you know, particularly in India post the trauma of partition, being able to articulate for Punjabis a Punjabi identity, you know, that had been fragmented.

Joti Singh (she/her): Literally.

Joti Singh (she/her): And,

Joti Singh (she/her): so, at that time, I decided I was in a PhD program, and I had this fantastic mentor at the Center for South Asia Studies at UC Berkeley, Daisy Rockwell, who said—

Lalita du Perron: Oh yeah, of course, I know Daisy!

Joti Singh (she/her): Yeah, of course you do. She was like, yeah, I mean, if you want to dance, why don't you do that?

Joti Singh (she/her): I think I just needed permission.

Lalita du Perron: At that moment, did you—

for those who don't know Daisy, Daisy is also a white woman like myself, very engaged with the study of South Asia. She's a phenomenal translator. Did you kind of feel like, oh, it's easy for you to say? Or was it more of—oh yes, I could just dance? Like, how did that go? Because it's sometimes hard to be kind of interculturally advised, if you will.

Joti Singh (she/her): Yeah, I see that. I mean, I think Daisy does, you know, at that time and still does have such an understanding—not from her personal lived experience, but from having spent so much time with South Asian students at UC Berkeley—

Joti Singh (she/her): there is an understanding of what kind of pressure exists in families.

Lalita du Perron: Yeah.

Joti Singh (she/her): So I don't think it's something that she said flippantly, like, oh, this should be easy enough for you to do.

Joti Singh (she/her): At the same time, I am lucky—I have parents who, while that's not necessarily the path they would have chosen for me, they did not diminish any amount of love or caring or involvement in my life because of it.

Joti Singh (she/her): And it gave me the freedom to make the decisions I wanted to make because I knew that it wasn't going to change whether they were in my life or not.

Joti Singh (she/her): And that's not the reality for a lot of young South Asians.

Lalita du Perron: For sure.

Joti Singh (she/her): And so I think it was something I already knew also, and it was kind of her helping me to say out loud something that was already apparent to me.

Joti Singh (she/her): That I, you know, doing a PhD—I was in a PhD program—that first of all, the department was not the right department for me.

Joti Singh (she/her): So if I was going to do a PhD, where else could I do it? But also, was that the thing to do?

Joti Singh (she/her): And it just kind of helped me to examine more than one option.

Joti Singh (she/her): I was clearly headed down one road that I was not sure I wanted to stay on.

Joti Singh (she/her): So, I started teaching.

Joti Singh (she/her): I started teaching a dance class, and simultaneously working at a nonprofit that serves dancers called Dancers Group.

Joti Singh (she/her): And yeah, that was kind of the trajectory.

Joti Singh (she/her): In 2007, I started Dunia, which we'll talk about, and that was kind of when I started to dance seriously and where it led me.

Joti Singh (she/her): In between that, I had gone to Guinea, West Africa. I was really studying a lot with teachers.

Joti Singh (she/her): And it was teaching me to really appreciate my own culture, because I had gone through this experience in adolescence of not wanting to identify with it.

Joti Singh (she/her): Through college and through studying West African dance, those experiences brought me back to realizing there is so much richness here.

Joti Singh (she/her): And it's something to run toward instead of run away from.

Lalita du Perron: Yeah, I find it fascinating that for so many immigrant families from South Asia, the way to connect their children to the kind of home culture, if you will, is through dance. And yet, when that becomes too much of a passion, that's problematic. I mean, I'm glad your parents put up with it, however, and then really supported you as well. But I know for many, many, especially female students, that's not the case at all.

I mean, for men, I think dance is less important, but I know in terms of the cultural kind of vision of it, but I think for young, first-generation women from South Asia, the quote-unquote classical dances are a very important part of cultural heritage preservation, but when there's any excitement about perhaps pursuing that professionally, that’s shut down pretty quickly.

And it's actually—I’ve mentored quite a few students at Stanford over that, because my academic work is on dance-related topics, Tawai culture, and so yeah, it's fascinating.

But with you, do you think it was a little bit different because you weren't in that quote-unquote classical? Like, it's a different way of connecting to dance, because it was more— I don't want to do a classical/folk distinction, but maybe for the sake of the podcast, less traditionally ritually sanctioned dance forms that you were engaging with as a child growing up in Georgia.

Joti Singh (she/her): Yeah, I mean, I do think it's a really different process of my learning of dance versus someone who's learning, you know, growing up in Palo Alto, for example.

Lalita du Perron: That would be exactly the example, yes. Right.

Joti Singh (she/her): And yeah, I think learning Punjabi dances the way that I learned them is a little less fraught and problematic in terms of who has access, although I could also be wrong about that, because I will acknowledge my own privilege.

Lalita du Perron: No, but I think it's a fair statement, even if it's more complicated than that.

Joti Singh (she/her): Yeah. I think the motivation was really for us to be together. It was not—you know, yes, we were learning dance and performing it, but the underlying motivation was all these families scattered around Atlanta, geographically distant from each other.

It was a way to bring us to one location and to have each other in each other’s lives, and really for the parents to socialize.

So I think that was kind of the main motivation.

And also my dad is a musician, so that made it different for me. It's not something he does professionally, but he would perform at community functions. Now he's in the gurdwara every weekend, singing shabads.

So we had a room in our house full of instruments, and having music around was normal.

It wasn’t like, “here’s something new you're going to learn”—it was connected to what he valued.

But yeah, I would say “put up with” is kind of the correct phrase for what my parents did.

And like so many South Asian parents, education was the most important thing for them.

And I have that privilege of being extensively and well educated, and I always try to reassure them—if this doesn’t work out, I have other skills.

Creating a career in dance is teaching me so many things about so many things.

Lalita du Perron: Yeah, for sure. Okay, let’s talk about Dunia Dance and Drum. It’s so beautifully alliterated, which is why I can never get the words in the right order.

Is your company—well, I guess that’s the question—is it your company? Is it your brainchild? And what is its mission?

Joti Singh (she/her): Yes, it’s Dunia Dance and Drum Company. It started as Dunia Dance Company in 2007.

And in 2008, my husband moved here from Guinea, and we added drum because he’s a drummer.

And I said, okay, I’ve started building something—let’s build it together.

Our mission is around both preserving our respective cultural forms as well as innovating within them.

We look to build community and affect social justice in whatever ways we can through our art.

The company started in 2007, so next year is our 20th year.

Lalita du Perron: Amazing. So you were also a baby when you started this.

Joti Singh (she/her): I was a baby. And I had made no business plan or anything.

Which, if I had, I probably would have said, I’m not going to do this.

But I’ve learned along the way.

I had been an English major and a South Asian Studies major, and neither prepared me for running a small business.

We started when a school in Oakland asked me to do a performance.

I said yes, and then realized—who is going to perform with me?

So I pulled together three friends, and we created something.

That’s how it started, and then it grew from there.

Lalita du Perron: Yes, and we're going to talk about Gather Geet. I guess at this point, you can tell people if they want to find out more about Dunia Dance, where can they go?

Joti Singh (she/her): Yes, so Dunia Dance, D-U-N-I-Y-A—DuniaDance.com, or Dunia Dance and Drum on Instagram.

Lalita du Perron: Your Instagram account is bopping, no pun intended. Lots of fun content, so if you are on Instagram, follow Dunia Dance and Drum, or otherwise go to the website.

Okay.

Joti Singh (she/her): Maybe I can talk a little bit—this will kind of segue into talking about the show—but about the programming we do.

So, education is a big part of it. My husband and co-director, Bongo City Bay, is in two schools a day teaching music.

We also do performances around the community—school assemblies, nonprofit events, family celebrations.

We recently performed in Dublin, California at a facility that was being considered as an ICE detention center, so we were in opposition to that, working with a youth justice organization called Courage.

We also create evening-length performances focused on lesser-known histories, especially in California.

One of the first major works I did was called Half and Halves, about Punjabi-Mexican communities in California. That was a collaboration with a Mexican folklórico group.

We’ve performed it in San Francisco, Fresno, Washington, D.C., and at the Smithsonian.

We’ve also created work about Guinea’s history and its first president, and more recently a collaboration with an Afro-Cuban group about connections between Guinea and Cuba.

So the work really focuses on histories that people don’t usually know about.

Lalita du Perron: Wow. So a lot of social justice work—it all makes sense.

How did you come to Gather Geet, and what is it?

Joti Singh (she/her): Gather Geet—Blood and Ink is the full name—is a performance about the Ghadar Party, which was based in the Bay Area in the early 1900s.

They were an organized political group fighting for India’s independence from the British.

My great-grandfather was part of that movement and a leader in it.

The performance combines dance, music, poetry, and archival projections to tell this story, using my great-grandfather’s role as a lens.

It connects that history to what is happening today and shows how the legacies of colonization still persist.

One of the important themes is that the Ghadar Party was an intersectional movement—they aligned with anti-colonial struggles around the world.

That’s a really important part of the performance: uplifting that today we must align with other justice movements.

The liberation of South Asian communities is tied to how we support Black, Latinx, LGBTQ+, and other movements.

It’s a call to the community to be involved and to think beyond just protecting our own.

Lalita du Perron: I really appreciated how you connected that history to present-day struggles—Palestine and other global injustices.

It was such a powerful reminder that these fights are ongoing and interconnected.

Joti Singh (she/her): Yeah, and every time we perform it, it stays relevant.

We update parts of the poetry to reflect current events.

There’s always something happening that connects back to the themes.

Sometimes I wish we could remove certain references—like Palestine—because that would mean things had improved, but that’s not the reality.

We also bring in issues like ICE and immigration.

And honestly, sometimes the people who most need to see the show are those who initially resist those connections.

Lalita du Perron: That’s powerful.

When you do educational work, do you see transformations in students?

Joti Singh (she/her): Yeah. I’ve been teaching in schools recently, and we were talking about how lucky we are to have an embodied practice like dance.

In a world where so much of life is on screens, dance reconnects us to our bodies.

At the Ruth Asawa School of the Arts, I worked with students who had never taken formal dance classes—just learned from YouTube or TikTok.

Over time, I saw them recognize the value of dance forms from their own cultures—especially Black and Brown traditions that aren’t always centered.

That transformation—becoming more open, more connected, more aware of each other’s cultures—was really powerful.

Lalita du Perron: One thing I loved about your performers was the diversity of bodies—different ages, ethnicities, body types.

It challenges the idea that dancers have to look a certain way.

Joti Singh (she/her): Yes, absolutely.

Inclusivity is not just something we say—it’s central to who we are.

When people audition, part of it is dance ability, but part of it is who they are as a person and how they show up in community.

I don’t want to create twelve versions of myself.

Different bodies and styles actually strengthen the storytelling.

Especially for something like the Ghadar Party, which involved many different personalities, that diversity makes the story more powerful.

Lalita du Perron: Jyoti Singh, we are truly out of time, but it has been phenomenal talking to you.

Listeners, please follow Dunia Dance and find ways to bring this work into your communities—as performers, educators, and activists.

Thank you so much.

Joti Singh (she/her): Thank you, thanks for having me.

Outro Music by Soham Shiva