'As mesmerizing as staring into the heart of a fire.'
Dance Current Magazine
Critical press
"Belsaré challenged notions of what is physically possible."
Ballet Review · Karen Greenspan · June 2019
"A virtuoso number."
The New York Times · Alastair Macaulay · August 2018
"A tour de force...a true act of transcendence and religious immersion...an extraordinary achievement, passing through many engrossing features of arm gesture, footwork, head movement, hand vibrations, always with some true sense of repose and at the same time with a gripping purposefulness from first to last."
The New York Times · Alastair Macaulay · August 2008"
A consummate dancer, quick-footed and exact, with clean lines and rhythmic alacrity. Belsaré, at full tilt, is as mesmerizing as staring into the heart of a fire...merges tradition and modernity through wildly pleasurable means."
The Dance Current Magazine · Penelope Ford · June 2008
"Toronto audiences have had plenty of opportunities to get to know the classical South Asian dance form Bharatanatyam but I doubt they've ever seen it performed with such extravagant virtuosity as Belsaré brings to it...a showstopper if ever there was one."
CBC Radio One · Michael Crabb, Dance Critic · Toronto
"Pure bliss...an extremely decisive dancer, with a modernist's inclination to effect sudden and severely specific dance images, which makes her an incisive and memorable performer."
ExploreDance.com · Mindy Aloff · June 2010
"Intelligent and intricate eloquence."
The Guardian · Judith Mackrell · July 2013
"Mesma's incredible strength, stamina and expressions, portraying the demeanor of the bird left the audience totally amazed."
The Indian Eye · August 2025
"Awestruck how one solo dancer could bring this story to life on stage."
The Dance Enthusiast · August 2025
"Mesma's portrayal of Hiranyakashipu — terrified and frozen at the sight of Narasimha — was so visceral that the audience collectively held its breath."
Narthaki.com · February 2025
Features & Interviews
Global Indian Artist
Cover Feature & Interview
A center-spread interview titled “Metaphor, Myth, and Movement” links painting and performance in Mesma's career. The feature explores her early influences, her concept of intensity flowing between painting and dance, and her educational and curatorial projects (from PEM’s “Sensational India” festival to MassArt) as catalysts for her artistry.
Interviewed in December 2025 by Chief Editor Dr. Anita Vallabh
"Intensity, when it flows between forms, becomes renewable."
-Mesma Belsaré
Epicenter, NYC
Artist Feature
Epicenter NYC covers Belsaré’s work across continents and disciplines, where dance and painting converge. Her work channels childhood memories, ancestral narratives, and ancient artistic techniques, creating a dialogue between myth, metaphor, and corporeal experience. Belsaré’s paintings and performances simultaneously bridge historical and contemporary visual languages, and excavate the pre-institutional memory of the body.
The Ballet Review
Interview
In this Ballet Review conversation, Mesma Belsaré emerges as an artist working beyond the boundaries of classical form, using Bharatanāṭyam as a site of inquiry rather than preservation.
Her long collaboration with Dr. Maya Kulkarni is central: a rigorous, dialogic process where choreography develops through sustained engagement with philosophy, literature, and visual art. Belsaré’s dual grounding in painting and dance produces work that is at once visual, embodied, and philosophical—marking the early articulation of a trajectory that continues to expand the possibilities of contemporary classical performance.
Published by The Dance Research Foundation, Inc.
Interview by Dance Researcher and Author,
Karen Greenspan
"We say a whole lot but only dance the essential."
-Mesma Belsaré, Ballet Review, Spring/Summer 2019
Scroll.in
Artist Feature
Vikram Zutshi’s feature highlights Mesma’s hybrid practice of dance and painting, and her IndoFuturist vision. Featured in Scroll.in, this article situates Belsaré across movement/dance and painting as one continuous inquiry. It addresses the role of constraint in both practices, the use of myth as structure, and the body as a layered site where memory and form remain in tension. The focus remains on process: how trained vocabulary is reoriented to access what lies beneath it.
Conversations
Global Indian Artist Podcast · 2026
In conversation with Dr. Anita Vallabh
A wide-ranging conversation on embodied knowledge, the immigrant body as archive, and what fifteen years of building Indian diaspora presence inside major American art institutions taught her about the relationship between classical form and cultural agency. Belsaré speaks about the unified logic of her dance and painting practices, where courage lives in a long artistic life, and what it means to pursue depth over relevance in a field that rewards adaptation.
