PERFORMANCE WORKS

As part of the European project 'Performing Gender: Dancing in Your Shoes' choreographer Nikita Maheshwary started in January 2022 with one-on-one walks with 15 women from different neighbourhoods of Tilburg. Under the project 'Thirty Seven and a Half' with DansBrabant, this developed over the months from a community of 19 women to the current core group of 9 Tilburg women.

The women, coming from different walks of life, upbringings, generations and cultures, were first concerned with the question ‘where do we come from?’ while reflecting together on overarching themes of care, womanhood, freedom & limitations, and what it means to be a community. In the second phase of the project, the urgency slowly began to shift to 'where are we going together' and 'what do we want to leave behind'.

The women show the result in the production ‘Residu(e): What we leave behind’; a poetic dreamscape about a shared and multicolored future. The colorful collection of stories is interwoven with scenes of small triumphant actions. A mix of movement, spoken word and multimedia, the performance is performed by a cast of women from varied age groups, abilities and physical capacities.

CREDITS

Concept & Choreography: Nikita Maheshwary

Project Coordinator/Community Developer: Lotte van Oudheusden

Music: Arthur Music - Arthur van der Kuip

Artwork: Nikè Marchand

Co-makers and performers: Felmy Laming | Monique van Beers | José van Rijswijk | Derya Demiroglu | Alie Pigmans | Judith Landman | Mieke de Roo | Harjanti Bors | Marianne Möller

Photography: Tessel Schmidt and William van der Voort

Videography: Tessel Schmidt

Premiere:
Theaterfestival Boulevard, 's-Hertogenbosch | 8 August 2023

Performed at:
Festival GLoBe, Tilburg | 27 August 2023 |

Theatre De Nieuwe Vorst, Tilburg | 22 September 2023

City of Women Contemporary Arts Festival, Ljubljana | 10 October 2023

Me&You: In a Dialogue is a collective  reading performance in which the audience members sit together to read series of letters addressed by me to you. Each person has a choice to select one of the four hyperwords in each letter progressing them to the next, to construct their own narrative.

The letters create multiple stories interweaving biography, autobiography, comment, critique, rebuke, lament, angst; unfolding untold accounts of inequality in cultural participation, censorship, capitalism & tribal nationalism, religion & morality, and the commodification of the arts.

Concept & Script: Nikita Maheshwary
Performers: Audience members + Nikita
Durational Performance

Performed at:
Come Together, Frascati Theatre, Amsterdam, NL | 5 March 2020 (Premiere)
Interazioni Festival, Rome, Italy | 30 September 2022
THIRD Annual Forum, DAS Graduate School, Amsterdam, NL | 29 October 2022
Curation Discrete, Gessnerallee, Zurich, Switzerland | 23 March 2023

Artist’s Note

The lecture performance invites the audience to reconstruct the viewership of the nautch girl away from the colonial imagination as documented through essentialist images of an east that were both evil & servile, and also, reflect upon the highly selective ways of the creation of oriental archetypes through which the ’otherness' of eastern narratives could be readily identified and adjudged to systemic exclusion from the high art performance discourse.

During my research, I poured over texts on tawaif performers, geishas, kabuki, cabaret dancers & their marginalized identity, studied female characters in western nude paintings and read & conducted interviews with current-day female performers. Parallel to this, I was interested in finding ways to connect how socioeconomic incidents such as the emergence of female voting rights, introduction of the contraceptive pill, institutionalization of dance, the four waves of feminism, independence of colonies, notions of nationalism, populist culture, inequality in cultural participation, the recent #metoo phenomenon and the advent of extreme right-wing governments across the world, have on the female body and especially on the body of the female performer.

These impressions led me to craft a self-reflective voice, in the form of letters exchanged between a contemporary female performer (me) and the past custodian of dance - the courtesan (Umrao), to delve deeper into the discourse on the ‘body of the female performer’ that is persistently contested as a site of entertainment, a site of work, pleasure, abuse, and stigma. And also, to critically examine what it means to be an artist and what kind of art and narratives we, as society and institutions,  privilege over others.

Artist’s Note

The process of creating this performance became a means to access, excavate, extract and present the myriad of impressions I collected over the months. The excerpts of the ‘walking conversations’ served as a starting point. All urgencies, desires, knowledge, emotions and expressions, stemmed from it. These were then compressed into layers to form the soundscape, script and visuals for the performance work.

Tujhko Banaya Gaya Hai Mere Liye (You have been made for Me) investigates the representation of women in Bollywood and Indian pop culture. It questions their objectification, the handed down warped codes of romance and the glorification of sexism in the mainstream that masquerades itself, sometimes as an innocent joke or gets etched in our heads as a catchy item song.

Set on the timeless, iconic romantic nazam from the 1976 Bollywood movie ‘Kabhi-Kabhi’, the piece borrows the movement vocabulary from the popular cultural image of a female and male body. It attempts to capture the varied gender equations, the society’s innate permissiveness towards the quintessential ‘chedkhani’ or eve-teasing and how this collective tolerance propagates and contributes to gender-related violence.

Concept & Direction: Nikita Maheshwary
Process Collaborators & Performers: Mahesh Saini & Nikita Maheshwary

Duration: 20 minutes

Performed at:
NIV Art Gallery, New Delhi | 4 August 2017
Italian Culture Center, New Delhi | 5 August 2017
Gati Dance Forum, New Delhi | 6 August 2017
Studio Safdar, New Delhi | 11 August 2017
Studio47, New Delhi | 2 September 2017