Mushtari Afroz

Mushtari Afroz is a GTA based dance artist with training in North Indian classical dance form ‘Kathak’ and has been practising within the South Asian diaspora since early 2000 following her immigration to Canada from Bangladesh. She has received extensive training in Lucknow style of Kathak under the tutelage of Ontario based teachers, dancers and choreographers Joanna de Souza and Saveeta Sharma. Currently she is advancing her training in the nuances of the dance form under the guidance of India based Kathak artist Anurekha Ghosh. Alongside the classical dance, Mushtari continues to train in contemporary dance and performance aesthetics. Since 2020 she has been training in Minnesota based Shawngram Institute for Performance and Social Justice’s trademark technique Yorchha – a contemporary Indian movement vocabulary that intersects principles from Indian classical dance Odissi (from the eastern state of Odisha), Vinyasa Yoga and the martial art form Chhau (also from eastern India) – through online classes and summer intensives. She recently completed an 8-week professional training with the Shawngram Institute through its NextGen platform.

In 2016, Mushtari established her dance collective ‘Kathak Bandi’ which through collaboration with Canadian musicians, dancers and theatre artists has created and presented original works for the stage in Canada and in the US. She is a recipient of supports from both Canada Council for the Arts and Ontario Arts Council. While she continues to create work for the stage, she is gradually carving out a new path off stage through choreographic intervention in public spaces. These works are interdisciplinary in nature and intend to critically investigate the relationship between human body and built spaces in urban environment. This new journey of hers began in winter 2022 at a month-long artist residency at Artscape Gibraltar Point on Toronto Island and she aims to deepen this journey through a practice-led research program in 2022-2023 in the Netherlands.