Ananya Chatterjea has always had endurance.

Physical endurance, most obviously. In 2005, ahead of her company Ananya Dance Theatre’s inaugural show, a Pioneer Press reporter writing with a tone somewhere between awestruck and admiring called her hours-long rehearsal schedule “grueling.”

Chatterjea, who by that point held a doctoral degree in dance and was as well-respected a dance scholar as she was a choreographer and performer, had moved to the Twin Cities in the late 1990s amid some personal turmoil to accept a teaching role at the University of Minnesota.

A 2003 Pioneer Press article praised her “silky and intricate hand gestures.” Still true. That 2005 story ahead of ADT’s debut described Chatterjea, then 41 years old, as “a gemstone in the fire” and said her choreographical “movements are raw and brimming with emotion.” Still true.

It’s been 20 years since then. Chatterjea herself is now more than double the age of some of her dancers and, still, performs alongside them as a member of the ensemble as well as its choreographer and artistic director. To prepare for ADT’s upcoming show “Swapnō Jhnāp: Dream Jumping,” marking the Frogtown-based company’s 20th anniversary, the dancers — Chatterjea very much included — are rehearsing about four hours a day, six days a week. She has no plans to let up.

“I feel like the magic is in the shared sweat and shared labor,” she said after a recent two-hour rehearsal block. “It’s in the doing of it, not in the abstract imagining of it.”

Ananya Dance Theatre will present “Swapnō Jhnāp: Dream Jumping” for two performances at 7:30 p.m. Sept. 19 and 20 at the O’Shaughnessy at St. Catherine University. Tickets are suggested $35 but on a pay-what-you-can sliding scale from $5 to $55, available via the theater’s online box office.

But if anything, Chatterjea’s physical endurance — and the physical endurance she guides her ensemble to build within themselves — is a conduit for spiritual, political, moral endurance.

“If you don’t believe in the politics of justice and liberation, then you can’t do this work, because you have to dance from that place,” she said. “If you are dancing for, ‘Look how fast my footwork is. Look how high I can jump,’ yes, that’s a valid reason for people to dance — it’s just that you won’t be set alive by doing this work.”

‘We’re conjuring worlds’

Ensemble members in St. Paul-based Ananya Dance Theatre pose for a portrait in March 2025. Pictured (from top) are dancers Davente Gilreath, Juliet Irving, Vy Nguyen, Noelle Awadallah, Zhané Jackson, Ananya Chatterjea, Belle Alvarez and Kealoha Ferreira. (Galen Higgins / Ananya Dance Theatre)

Ananya Dance Theatre’s flagship productions are these annual fall shows like “Swapnō Jhnāp: Dream Jumping,” which are fully devised from the ground up over the course of about a year.

Each show starts with a social need Chatterjea sees “bubbling to the surface,” around which she comes up with themes and narrative ideas that she, ever the dancer, first expresses through choreography. Then she’ll commission music to match and bring on collaborators to build up a full-scale show.

“We’re conjuring worlds with these narratives,” she said. “Everything is created. The music is created, the scenography is created, the props are created, the costumes are created, the text — my relationship with Nia (Witherspoon, the show’s dramaturg and writer) — that too takes time.”

This year’s show takes inspiration from the idea of quantum jumping, a phenomenon in physics that’s been reimagined within feminist and social justice circles as “the notion of how we can imagine ourselves jumping to a desired reality, which then brings us closer to that state,” Chatterjea said.

Within “Dream Jumping,” the ensemble jumps across five ‘portals,’ from an ocean of grief to meeting ancestors in a dance club to mythical creatures to a desolate landscape and beyond.

Like all Chatterjea’s work, she said, this show’s story “is never literal, it’s always abstract, but there’s an arc.” More than anything, the show is a metaphor for a big question: “There’s so much suffering across the world. How do we hold ourselves up in the face of so much pain? We learn that the dream of justice sometimes needs this ferocious rage,” she said.

‘A place of steadfastness’

Ensemble members in St. Paul-based Ananya Dance Theatre pose for a portrait in March 2025. Pictured (from left) are dancers Vy Nguyen, Kealoha Ferreira, Belle Alvarez, Zhané Jackson, Ananya Chatterjea, Davente Gilreath, Noelle Awadallah and Juliet Irving. (Galen Higgins / Ananya Dance Theatre)

That ferocity is not anger — it’s movement. It’s power in the body.

This is a principle Chatterjea calls Shawngrām, movement as active resistance against injustice. Within this framework, over the past two decades, Chatterjea has carefully assembled a trademark dance style she calls Yorchhā, which blends classical Indian dance with principles from yoga, martial arts and contemporary dance techniques, along with strong feminist and social justice influences.

Dancers use mudras, or symbolic hand gestures common in Indian movement practices; bols, or chanted rhythmic syllables — many of which are traditional but some are words of resistance that Chatterjea sneaks into shows in her native Bengali — and intricate footwork patterns made sharply percussive as dancers drop their weight and maintain low centers of gravity for hours at a time.

“In a lot of specific Western forms like ballet, a very common phrase is that you plie, you bend, to rise; you go to the ground to be able to elevate,” said dancer Kealoha Ferreira, now in her 10th season in the ADT ensemble and the company’s associate artistic director. “And in this form, it’s the opposite. Ananya always says, you go down to stay down. You go down to deepen.”

During parts of “Dream Jumping,” the music is sparse and elegant; at other times, it’s jerky and discordant by design. Occasionally, poetic English text is blended into the score. But what’s most interesting about watching the nine-member ensemble rehearse is that the performers are not simply dancing to music, and not just responding to it, but also interacting with it and co-creating it with their rhythmic bols and slapping foot stomps.

As anyone who’s danced with Chatterjea would tell you, her Yorchhā style is not easy. Chatterjea herself will freely admit it’s not easy. (Hence the intense rehearsals: “You have to work really hard and be honest with yourself: You didn’t quite do it this time, so do it better next time,” she said.)

But more than any other dance style she’s trained in, Ferreira described, Chatterjea’s choreography taps into a sort of alchemy that turns movement into spiritual growth.

“The form really challenged me, really pushed me to dig and to excavate and to let go of these ideas of who I was and how my body needed to be in the world, and to access something that came out of vulnerability and a deep ancestral strength,” Ferreira said. “To sustain that in your body, you have to find a place of steadfastness and defiance.”

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The ensemble of Ananya Dance Theatre’s “Swapnō Jhnāp: Dream Jumping” includes dancers Ananya Chatterjea, Kealoha Ferreira, Noelle Awadallah, Lizzette Marie Chapa, Belle Alvarez, Juliet Irving, Davente Gilreath, Vy Nguyen and Heaven Sha’Rae. The show is choreographed by Chatterjea, directed by k.t. shorb and composed by Greg Schutte.

If You Go

What: “Swapnō Jhnāp: Dream Jumping” by Ananya Dance Theatre, a St. Paul-based ensemble marking its 20-year anniversary

When: 7:30 p.m. on Sept. 19 and 20

Where: the O’Shaughnessy at St. Catherine University; 2004 Randolph Ave.

Tickets: suggested $35 but on a pay-what-you-can sliding scale from $5 to $55, available online at oshag.stkate.edu/events