Monali Varaiya is a dancer and musician at the Bay Area-based Gamelan Sekar Jaya and a student of Sanskrit at the University of California, Berkeley. Under 2018 US Fulbright Student grant, she is diving deep into Balinese masked dance and documenting the mythology, symbolism, and philosophy underlying this dynamic form of dance drama in a project entitled, “Masked Dance for Modern Times: Ritual Performance of Topeng Pajegan” supported by IKIP Saraswati, Bali.

Her parallel immersions in a biotech career, Balinese performing arts, and Indic spiritual traditions have shown her that embodied practices of traditional music and dance are powerful vehicles for personal growth and engaging with wisdom traditions. She is keen to learn to embody a character on stage and study lesser-known aspects of Javano-Balinese Shaiva religion as expressed in topengan dance. This research project will be completed in April 2020.