Open and Shut
2019
Co-Director and Performer
Open and Shut is a one-woman performance looks at how women in positions of systemic power negotiate multiple, opposing demands. Lakshimi Nagappa, a senior police officer, is giving a talk to young college students. As a senior woman officer, how does she navigate and deploy power around class, religion, caste, gender and her position? How do personal biases and agendas play out? What is the relationship between systemic power and individual discretion when it comes to a police investigation of rape or sexual assault? This piece examines and complicates the idea of justice and explores impunity within the law enforcement system. It is a combination of realistic character work and stylized physical imagery that amplifies the power dynamics in the scene.
Still Standing
@Srishti 2018
Director
Still Standing is a performance that is built around the embodied experience of stillness; not the idea of stillness. This is a minimalist performance that starts with the body and brings stillness to our attention. Does stillness feel more like ‘holding on’ or ‘letting go’? In a world filled with distraction and overwhelming stimuli, it seems imperative to explore stillness. Stillness becomes disruption. Stillness becomes protest. Stillness becomes dissent. In a challenge to the current notion that ‘if this is good, more must be better’, this project strips back performance that showcases the spectacular, and presents the uncompromising reality of our bodies.
Head2Head 2018
Director
Head2Head: The Big Fat Company plays with Hayavadana is a devised performance with an ensemble of plus sized actors. It uses the iconic Kannada play Hayavadana by Girish Karnad to raise questions about body, mind and identity and what it means to be a plus sized actor in today's world.
BodyMine 2017
Choreographer and performer
BodyMine is a solo dance-theatre performance that investigates the tension between the experience of ‘body as liability’ and ‘body as abundance’. The current dominant socio-cultural construction of the body encourages us to experience our bodies as a liability, almost as something that gets in the way of life. BodyMine overturns this experience of the body by exploring the abundance of possibility that it holds−in art and in life.
Positively Shameless 2016
Co-Director
Positively Shameless is a devised theater performance about surviving childhood sexual abuse (CSA) and working through the residues as an adult. The play seeks to challenge the dichotomy between 'pure' and 'applied' art by interweaving the therapeutic and artistic processes to achieve a performance that is both personally and socially relevant.
Keep calm and #ashtag 2015
Co-director
Keep calm and #ashtag explores how gender is constructed and reinforced in real and virtual public spaces in the Indian urban context. Cyberspace becomes a new public space in which gender plays itself out: Why does Nikhil play an online game as a female avatar? Why does Tanya create an anonymous Facebook profile and what does she do with it? What happens when Sachin’s fighting video goes viral? The play looks at the collisions of real and virtual spaces and the drama that unfolds.
A Quiet Dance
2015
Choreographer
A Quiet Dance is a performance that takes place in public spaces. It blurs the lines between audience and performer; choreographed and pedestrian movement; and stage and street. Set to a movement score that the performers listen to through headphones, but the audience never hears, the work weaves through and is embedded into whatever context it is being performed in.
De Sidere 7 2014
Collaborator and performer
De Sidere 7 is an experimental work that interweaves performance, dance, poetry, storytelling and text to reflect upon aspects of desire. The film scripts the work of five performance artists into a sensorially rich meditation on desire's vexed status, at once animating force, object of suspicion, and ground of contention. It is conceived as a videocontemplation: a multi layered composition intended to be experienced as a whole.
Good Girls Don't Dance 2013
Collaborator and performer
Good Girls Don't Dance is a documentary that questions the notions that shape society's reaction to sexual harassment, molestation and rape.