Dayita Nereyeth (she/her) is a co-founder of 206 Dance Collective, senior editor for The Clean Copy, and an Alexander Technique teacher. She received a BA in Dance and Psychology from Mount Holyoke College in 2015. In 2022 she became an advanced professional member of the Chartered Institute of Editing and Proofreading (CIEP), UK. 

 

As a performer, Dayita is informed and inspired by ballet, Cunningham, and improvisational techniques. She is invested in finding and forging connections which manifest in performance as easy precision and expansive presence. She believes that dance is a means to living fully, at the pinnacle of human experience: a celebration of the body’s natural mechanics. By exploring diverse vocabularies, she endeavours to inhabit movement with nuance and clarity. In her ongoing movement investigations, Dayita balances simplicity with lightness and play. Stillness and inner quiet are equally vital to her enquiries. Abstraction and the ever-dynamic internal logic of creative structures provide blueprints for her quests into the unknown. Above all, Dayita understands performance as an expression of a unified self.

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Dayita has collaborated with Ellen Oliver, Poorna Swami, Margaret Wiss, Anishaa Tavag, Joshua Sailo, Bharavi, Dara Hankins, Mario Schenker, and Ainesh Madan, among others. In addition to her in-person interactions, Dayita has pursued cross-continental art-making processes since 2017. Dayita has performed in work by Merce Cunningham (50 Looks, TV Rerun, and Squaregame), Sasha Waltz & Guests (In C), Claudia Lavista and Omar Carrum (Full and Empty), Tong Wang (In the Reflection), Charles Flachs (Homage to M), Billbob Brown (Judgments), Yana Lewis (Belle and the Beast), Sarah Locar (Heimatlos), Mirra (iFace), Diya Naidu (Rorschach Touch), Pat Catterson (Project 114), Poorna Swami and Marcel Zaes  (The Long and Short of It), Vinod Ravindran (On Living with the World), and Veena Basavarajiah, among others. From 2007 to 2011, Dayita was a member of the Yana Lewis Dance Company, which toured India and Switzerland. 

 

Passionate about other aspects of artistry, Dayita has worked extensively in stagecraft, at the American Dance Festival (USA) and Dixon Place (USA), and in coordination at Shoonya – Centre for Art and Somatic Practices (India). She has also conducted research on how dancers learn and remember movement and on the representation of movement in thought at the Memory for Movement/Day Cognition Lab at Duke University (USA) and American Dance Festival, and for her honours thesis, The Moving Mind: An Exploration of Dance and Imagery, at Mount Holyoke College (USA).

 

Dayita currently lives in Bangalore, India. In her free time, she dances, sings, plays the ukulele, reads, watches too much TV, writes, and brews kombucha.