About
The Australian Kathak Company connects the global Kathak community, celebrating & advancing excellence and leadership in the form through its platform.
The Australian Kathak Company is a Melbourne-based platform dedicated to engaging global and local audiences with Kathak in a considered and nuanced manner.
Kathak carries centuries of embodied knowledge — in movement, pedagogy, lineage, and cultural memory. While performance remains at the heart of the form, much of its richness extends beyond the stage. The Australian Kathak Company engages this richness and brings it into dialogue with contemporary mediums — engaging with Kathak's legacy while remaining attentive to its contemporary practice and ongoing evolution.
Through original productions and editorial content, the platform creates new ways of seeing and experiencing the form. It connects the global Kathak community — from India to London, New York, and beyond — while sharing this richness with audiences in Australia and around the world.
The Australian Kathak Company invites both new and existing audiences to engage with one of the world's great classical art forms: not as a relic, but as a living, evolving practice with enduring relevance and extraordinary depth.
Letter from the Founder
I came to Kathak as an adult, drawn in by its beauty, its technique, and the sheer weight of history carried in every movement. That fascination deepened quickly into something more serious: a growing awareness of the gap between the calibre of this art form and the professional structures available to support it — a gap the artists I have since spoken with, in Australia and around the world, have echoed again and again.
I founded The Australian Kathak Company as my contribution and seva to developing and advancing the ecosystem for the current and emerging artists of this art form, as well as a means of exploring new creative terrain through it. I began my career in management consulting, and that background shapes the way I run this company today — a commitment to professionalism, storytelling, editorial and curatorial instinct, and care for both people and process. I've brought that same rigour to building something I believe Kathak deserves: a platform capable of presenting the form and its artists at the highest level, and creating real, sustainable, career-defining opportunities for the people carrying it forward.
That is what this platform is working toward — not just documenting the form, but contributing to its ecosystem. Opening up new and considered ways for audiences, both familiar and new, to discover Kathak. Creating pathways for artists that don't yet exist, here in Australia and internationally.
This is an ongoing conversation, and an ongoing piece of work — one rooted in deep respect for the tradition, and genuine ambition for where it can go. I'm glad you're here for it.
Simi Kaur
Founder, Director and Editor-in-Chief The Australian Kathak Company