Two triple bill shows, each featuring 3 extraordinary performances including stellar international and local artists on 3 evenings. Both classical and contemporary South Asian dance will be seen at Dancehouse the premier space for contemporary dance in Australia. Not to be missed. These artists were mentored by renowned dancers Priyadarsini Govind, Mavin Khoo and Dr. Chandrabhanu to create new works.
These 6 commissions serve to highlight the range that is postcolonial South Asian dance practice to consider what is the “contemporary.” The works are at once contemporary, classical and experimental and reflect the complexity that is South Asian dance. Each work is political in its own right, addressing power in different contexts, ranging from identity issues, sexuality, to being rendered homeless due to war and assimilation as migrants. They provoke a rethinking of what cultural equity in dance might look like if we actually reflected the diverse dance practices that are Naarm/Melbourne.
Program One
Kasi Aysola’s work Eyes explores the fragmented and multiple viewpoints and perspectives of the God who falls from grace.
Shyama Sasidharan and Divya Shreejit Kumar’s duet Melbourne Rasa focuses on the migrant emotional and political struggle to ‘belong’ by investigating multiple emotional landscapes using both screen and live performance.
Rukshikaa Elankumaran’s work Amma: The Loss of our Motherland uses classical Indian dance and is based on the Tamil Eelam liberation struggles in Sri Lanka exploring the emotions Tamil refugees and migrants experienced when they fled the country fearing persecution and genocide.
Program Two
Shriraam Theiventhiran’s work Sacred Sensuality navigates the interplay of love, lust and religious sentiment through the classical dance medium. He asks “Is it improper, sinful even, to gaze at the Lord with thoughts of lust?”
Sooraj Subramaniam’s work Nimbus is a contemporary dance solo journeying into the internal conflicts humans undergo when their expectations, their dreams, their aspirations get broken, where the rain of a nimbus (a dark and amorphous cloud) serves as metaphor
Raina Peterson’s work Maya (excerpts) is an experimental solo dance work exploring Hindu conceptions of the self and the cosmos through a trans lens, and vice versa – exploring the trans experience using the frameworks of Hindu philosophy.