dear you - yours lovingly,me

Dear You-Yours Lovingly, Me
(2022)

The publication ‘Dear You - Yours Lovingly, Me’ is a performative object imagined and designed as an old box of letters one finds in one’s grandma’s attic. It contains sixteen personal letters from the author, addressed to ‘you’ from ‘me’, written and to be read in no particular order. These letters delve in the themes of care, guilt, limitations, motherhood, nationalism, decoloniality and questionable historiographies - looked through the lens of a brown dancing girl -the naachnewali. The publication has a special epilogue, ‘A dramaturgy of Correspondence’, where seven artists, thinkers and activists share their thoughts and reflections in private correspondences with the author, i.e. in the format of letters, on themes synonymous.

“….(in these letters) ‘I’ reveals and vibrates its multitude, because the ‘you’ it addresses constantly changes – from being the writer’s past self, to a future child, to friends-artists, one of which is dying, to historical and fictional role models. The ‘I’ as artist, as mother, as friend or spectator tries to find and claim her place in a world that is still defined by too many inequalities between cultures, religions and genders. The ‘I’ as dancer, moving between past, present and future. The ‘I’ as a ‘temporary custodian merely a link between the dead and the unborn’. ….So, if there is one sentence in this first collection that weaves everything together, it is the writer’s intention to be mindful - for all the women to become; for all the women yet to come”
~ Guy Cools (2022)

Author: Nikita Maheshwary
Advisor & Writer ‘Dear Reader’: Guy Cools
Art Direction & Design: Laurence Felber
Copyediting: Sunaina Jain
Epilogue ‘A Dramaturgy of Correspondence’ Contributors: Elena Tzanavalou, Guy Cools, Lara Staal, Lisa Reinheimer, Mojra Vogelnik Êkerlj,
Salvo Lombardo, Saumya Baijal
Printed & Bound: Kropf und Herz GmbH (DE)
This publication is supported by: Creative Europe Project Micro Macro Dance Dramaturgies | DansBrabant

Print Publication - available on request

care as a dialogical practice

Care as a Dialogical Practice
(2023) for Online Research Publication - Roots & Routes

The three writings ‘on care’ emerged over the last two years, each as a musing, unreeling the meaning of this shapeshifting word in different constellations. While the first short diary entry is questioning ‘care as a concept’, the second writing is an unsent letter to a dying friend unpacking ‘care as a transaction’ –  given and taken. For the third, I took ‘care as an emotion’ to be the overarching theme to write a short fictional story – which weaved itself into a conversation between an old Indian Muslim tawaif (courtesan) and a retired circus performing French bearded woman on the qayamat ki raat (the night of the Judgement Day).

In retrospect, these writings emerged perhaps from my own subconscious desire to understand this word as a new mother in the post covid era; and repeatedly in thought and on paper, care appeared as a dialogical practice. Unlike the neoliberal capitalist ‘care’ given with solution-oriented mindset by providing customers with clearly determined A-B-C options, I understood care as something which is messy, complex and non linear, only appearing when one enters in a conversation with the other with curiosity, uncertainty and humility of not-knowing.

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THE BEARDED WOMAN AND THE COURTESAN

The Bearded Woman and the Courtesan
(2023)

Commissioned by - Balatiott Museum, Festival La Straordinaria, Lugano, Switzerland.

A short fictional story weaved as the last conversation between an old Indian Muslim tawaif (courtesan) and a retired circus performing French bearded woman on the qayamat ki raat (the night of the Judgement Day).

Standing Tall(ER)

Standing Tall(er)
(2023)

An essay Standing Tall(er) as part of the publication The ABC of Micro Macro Dramaturgies in Dance.
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the mountain of maybe(S)

The Mountain of Maybe(s)
2020

The Mountain of Maybe(s) is a mapping of a performance process which evolved from an online to an offline environment in the midst of a raging pandemic and all its restrictions. The book unpacks the drastic shift in the ways of being and thinking that led to the emergence of new codes of performance making and performativity. Against the backdrop of four conversations and an epilogue - notes of a midwife, the book traces poems, doodles, Zoom performances that preceded the slurry of texts, skinscapes and scenes of rigour (and sometimes, sheer magic!) which built a performance that embraced the macroscopic situation, and each other, while being unalterably apart.

Editor & Writer: Nikita Maheshwary
Art Direction & Design: Laurence Felber
Contributors: Adele Didelez, Alexandra Raval, Andréa Martin Lopez, Elodie Dubuc, Francesca Orso, Gabriella de Gennaro,
Laurence Felber, Lina Isaksson, Mar Olivé Nieto, Maria Madeira, Samuel Rhyner, Sien van Acker, Vanessa Sweekhorst
Photography: Maria Madeira & Jona Harnischmacher
Copyediting: Sunaina Jain
Published by: Fontys Academy of Circus and Performance Art, Fontys Hogeschool voor de Kunsten, Tilburg, 2020

Click here for Digital Publication - The Mountain of Maybe(s)
Print Publication - available on request