In the “Kathak!” program on Friday, the duo Piyush Chauhan and Preeti Sharma made a great impression, perhaps because of the indoor space. Dressed in scarlet, they have terrific glamour and flair. It was in their many sudden stops amid speed that I appreciated how Kathak (once associated with the courts of the Indian north) exemplifies a central aspect of Indian dance philosophy: motion in stillness, stillness in motion.

But Drive East, building on advances made last year, is showing other aspects of India’s diversity. These include feminism and dualities of gender (though not yet homosexual love, still a matter of fierce political debate in India). It’s curious that with Drive East and other recent New York presentations of Indian dance, there’s more exploration onstage of gender diversity than feminism.

Kathakali (from Kerala, in the southwest) has almost invariably been a male form; here, Cleopatra was played by a man, Prabal Gupta, dressed in garb that evoked Queen Victoria. Ms. Mahanta ended her recital (in the Sattriya idiom, from the northeastern state of Assam) in male attire as one of the demon kings of mythology and his son. Both Sattriya and Kathakali are highly traditional genres; I found it easy to enjoy Ms. Mahanta’s presentation of monstrous masculinity, but hard to like (at times, hard to understand) Mr. Gupta’s very stylized version of the Egyptian queen (eyebrows vibrating, torso slowly circling above parted thighs).

More conceptually complex was the program “Dualities of Dance: Addressing Gender in Indian Classical Dance.” Kiran Rajagopalan not only performed his recital in female dress but also, in his second number, combined Indian style with Yoruba elements from West Africa. Mesma Belsare, who performed in New York in 2008 as Sudarshan Belsare (then part of the tradition of Stri Vesham, or female impersonation), delivered a virtuoso number, “Shilpa Natana: The Dancing Sculptures,” partly invoking the androgynous mythological archetype Ardhanarishwara. Ms. Belsare dances the Bharatanatyam style (associated with Tamil Nadu, India’s south-easternmost state), as did Mr. Rajagopalan.