☰
A celebration of nostalgia through the scent of mogra (Indian jasmine), Breathe In The Fragrance is a production for three dancers and three musicians that combines traditional Indian dance elements with queer fantasy.
An erotic ritual sourced from bodily records and memories of India, Breathe In The Fragrance invites collective transformation through the sensory experience of smell, sound, taste and touch.
I work with a dance language that is grounded in ancestral knowledge. My performances, including Breathe In The Fragrance, invest in ideas from hyper-specific contexts, sourced from records in my body and from ritualistic resonances that linger in my memories of India.
The hyper-specificity in this work includes:
1) The mogra (Indian Jasmine) that is used in festivals, rituals and celebrations all over India. We create a sensory ritual with mogra as part of our set design, as well as the choreography, where there is a build up in the experience of the mogra to a crescendo at the end, where the stage is covered with it.
2) "Brown Queerness" sourced from my lived experiences of growing up queer in India and celebrating the aesthetics of iconic Indian movie stars like Rekha, who offered gay kids like me a rich fantasy world to inhabit.
3) The dance language and music, traditional Bharatanatyam and Carnatik music, infused with queerness.
Viewers have the agency of meaning making. They might experience Breathe In The Fragrance solely as a litany of images and sound, a moving sculpture or perhaps a ritual. They may experience it as narcissism, voyeurism, intimacy, longing, or simply a fantasy.
