Commissioned by Serendipity Arts Foundation for Serendipity Arts Festival 2024
In this project, the curator envisions an adaptation of traditional women’s work songs through dance performances that traverse our nation, probing a critical question: what comes to our mind when we think of women's songs of labour and millstone?
Over the years, women’s work songs historically construct and reproduce their repetitive drudgery and everyday rhythms–further becoming vehicles of the construction and reproduction of gender identity. Accompanying their work with singing, accentuating the rhythms created by the everyday work. With dancers identified from specific geographical locations, this production will demonstrate the spatial, linguistic, and thematic range of women’s work by platforming music and dance forms in various languages, such as the Ovi from Maharashtra, weaving songs from Punjab, the Portuguese Fado from Goa, and songs of migration and separation from Bihar.
The performance will construct interconnected spaces, both domestic and public, in which women’s lives and work unfold. It will consider the loneliness of this work but also the contexts it offers for women to experience fun, friendship, and the divine. It offers a glimpse into the richly textured lives of everyday women through their conceptualisation of and relationship to work in their own words and voices.
Artists:
Geeta Chandran (Concept, Design, Direction)
Anirudh Varma (Music Design and Direction)
Pratik Biswas (Sound)
Kiran Naik (Set Design)
Tamilarasi R (Light Design)
Amrithasruthi Radhakrishnan (Project Assistant and Manager)
Abhinaya Nagajothy, Anukriti Vishwakarma, Monami Nandy, Shweta Devendra, Sowmya Narayanan (Dancers)
Aastha Mandle, Basudhara Roy Munshi, Suhavi Kalsi (Vocalists)
Abhay Nayampally (Carnatic Guitar)
Rohit Prasanna (Flute)
Mahavir (Dholak/Percussion)
Ishan Sharma (Tabla)
