For this MetLiveArts commission, Ballet Hispánico Artistic Director and CEO Eduardo Vilaro reacts to the ideas presented in the exhibit Juan de Pareja: Afro-Hispanic Painter with Buscando a Juan (“Looking for Juan”) and explores the “sancocho”—literally, mixed soup—of cultures and diasporas.

Composer Shawn Okpebholo and Duke University professor Dr. Tsitsi Ella Jaji bring individual stories to life through song.

Join featured artists and the curator of the exhibitions “Water Memories” and “Art of Native America: The Charles and Valerie Diker Collection” for a conversation exploring the significance of water to diverse Indigenous peoples and Nations in the United States, as expressed through historical, modern, and contemporary art. Delve into the artists’ artistic processes while examining the ongoing work to protect water and land, aesthetic activism, and the unique challenges contemporary Indigenous artist-activists face.

In her fifth and final performance as 2021-2022 MetLiveArts Artist in Residence, the incomparable choreographer and dancer Bijayini Satpathy built on her prior explorations of movement and art with an evening-length performance for the stage of the Grace Rainey Rogers Auditorium. The new work, entitled “Dohā,” navigates the relationship between prayer and play, moving away from the Odissi dance form’s customary theistic depictions to highlight the bhāva—emotional experience—of prayer as an embodied human act. Within the discipline of ritualized prayer, Satpathy embraces play and playfulness as an essential part of the individual’s search for the divine.

In “Naino,” a courtyard within a scholar’s garden in the city of Suzhou, China inspires a narrative exploration of a poem by Kabir, a 15th-century Indian mystic claimed by both Hindu and Islamic traditions. The poem is worldly and spiritual as it employs intimate, erotic speech that is typical to both the Sufi way of Islam and the Bhakti tradition of Hinduism. The speaker invites the beloved into their eyes, and from there into their inner landscape. The ideal here is to become one with the divine by taking in its magnificent vision.