Day 1: Ocean of Song & Dance: Emerging Currents in Tibetan & Himalayan Performance Studies

Name: Day 1: Ocean of Song & Dance: Emerging Currents in Tibetan & Himalayan Performance Studies
Start: 2025-12-05T14:30:00+00:00
End: 2025-12-05T21:30:00+00:00
Location: WEAI Conference Room (IAB 918)

December 5 @ 2:30 pm - 9:30 pm

Ocean of Song and Dance brings together scholars, artists, and practitioners to event poster explore the shifting currents of song, dance, ritual, and theatre across the Tibetan and Himalayan worlds. Featuring a keynote address by Jamyang Norbu and panels on performance, gender, and identity, the program also includes live, immersive demonstrations and participatory workshops on ache lhamo, or Tibetan opera. The conference highlights performance at the intersections of tradition and innovation, the sacred and the secular, and the local and the global, culminating in a participatory discussion on new directions for performance studies in Tibetan & Himalayan contexts. Through conversation, performance, and shared experience, Ocean of Song and Dance celebrates the creativity and interconnectedness of Himalayan expressive cultures, inviting reflection on the power of performance to carry history, shape identity, and inspire new cultural currents.

RSVP FOR DAY 1

Day 1 | December 5, 2025

2:30pm-4:00pm

Table reading of Meeting the Madman, a play by Donald Lopez

Location TBA

4:00pm-4:45pm

Tea break

4:45pm – 5:00pm

Welcome Remarks / Constantine Lignos

International Affairs Building 918

5:00pm – 6:00pm

Keynote Address / Jamyang Norbu

International Affairs Building 918

6:00pm-7:15pm

Dinner break

7:30pm – 9:30pm

Ache Lhamo (Tibetan Opera) Demonstration / Tenzin Kelsang, Isabelle Henrion-Dourcy

International Affairs Building 918

Speaker Bios:

Jamyang Norbu (High Asia Research Center) is a Tibetan writer and political activist. He has written books and theatre pieces in English and Tibetan. He received the Hutch Crossword Book Award for The Mandala of Sherlock Holmes. He was director of the Tibetan Institute of Performing Arts in Dharamsala, India, in the 1980’s and edited the volume Zlos-Gar (Tibetan Performing Arts) to commemorate the Institute’s 25th anniversary. He is the founder of the High Asia Research Center based in Jackson Heights, New York City.

Constantine Lignos (Columbia University) is a PhD candidate in East Asian Religions studying the role of performance in Tibetan Buddhist tantric ritual. His dissertation, Ritual Realities: Performance, Transformation, and Awakening in Tibetan Buddhist Tantric Dance, examines how performance becomes a mode of producing ontological and cosmological knowledge in Tibetan Buddhism. By reframing tantric Buddhism as a performative tradition in which awakening is enacted through embodied practice rather than merely represented in text, he analyzes tantric dance manuals and their transmission to show how texts function as active agents in choreographic processes, blurring the boundaries between archive and repertoire.

Isabelle Henrion-Dourcy (Université Laval) is a faculty member in Anthropology at Université Laval. She is a Tibetologist and anthropologist. She has investigated Tibetan popular culture over the last 25 years, looking at drama, pop music, dance, television, social media, cinema, and autobiographical writing. She seeks to understand cultural and political dynamics running through High Asia, namely shifts in imaginary and identity occurring among Tibetan societies since the take-over of the People’s Republic of China, how tradition and modernity play out in ideology and practice, the uses of cultural heritage and the emergence of contemporary Tibetan cultural forms—both official and popular. She has written, among others, a long monograph on Tibetan drama, and edited three volumes on Tibetan performing arts and the anthropology of media.

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