Jay

Funny you remember, back then it was called Sunset. And now it's called Beneath the Music, which is premiering soon in Perth, Western Australia. It came out of the Artists at Work program that Belvoir St Theatre was [running] in Sydney. At that moment, we were talking about this idea of an estate. There was a question of unresolved injuries that we could dig into or zoom out from, and re-interpret it through a historical narrative. I knew I wanted to investigate queerness in a South Asian context. I guess, personally, it has had a material bearing on my life. But I was also interested in what was happening in India at the time, the distance or the proximity to the conversation in India from where I stand, and the effect it has on migration, on our perception of queerness, here, living between two cultures. It felt like fertile ground to explore. At that moment, I was also connecting with quite a lot of family somehow coincidentally. And the conversations of hidden queerness and open queerness, becoming visible and invisible was front of mind. That's what gave birth to this work, Beneath the Music.

The pressure derived from this inherited notion of coming out in the West and how queerness is understood or how coming out is understood when it rubs up against the expectations of culture can be difficult. There can be friction between those ideas. You know, for example, an anecdote would be the value of coming out in Australia reduced to a kind of simplicity expressed in questions like, why don't you just tell your parents? or why can't they just get over something like this? But [this overlooks] the actual complexity of what this person is going through. In my case, my mother, and in this play also an Indian mother – the societal pressure, the historical notion of tradition. I was interested in when and where the stigma around queerness surfaced. And I kept going back and back in time. It was grounded in a very personal search. But the question I needed to find an answer for is: when and where did things change? Because, in the mythologies of Mahabharata, or in our stories of Hindu gods like Ardhanarishvara this concept of queerness is very prominent. Where does the dividing of this concept or idea of God separate so distinctly from humans in today’s context? With this project, I guess I am trying to find resonances which go beyond time and space and to remember what, how, when and where we have come from, what this journey has been and re-write the narrative of how we show up in the world.

At this juncture, Footscray Community Arts in Melbourne commissioned the project. And then I came across the story of Shikhandi in the Mahabharata. And then we kept digging further, and we found the story of Krishna transforming into Mohini. And that was the moment where, you know, you see this fluidity, you see that movement between genders, and that love can mean so many things. From there, we have honed in on the stories of the creation of Krishna and Mohini, the radically queer thinking of that time. And its epicness. And its openness. And its fluidity with this contemporary context of a mother and a son, who are also trying to go on a journey to understand each other. The play poses the conversation. In many ways, the end doesn’t matter. As both artist and audience, let's sit in this discomfort with culture, with history, with queerness, with contemporariness, with migration, with moving identities. That's what the project is now – it's a 70-minute play that swims in this ugly mess and beautiful mixture of things.

J

At first, I was actually given a commission to write the work and it was quite an interesting process after that, because I felt that going into it as a writer who writes on paper versus writing on stage with other people is the way I like working. I have fun doing it because I’m often working with personal subjects. I didn't bring in a director.

At that moment, there was an old collaborator standing in as a director during the development phase. And I also invited a poet and dramaturg Karthika Nair. She wrote the 2015 book Until the Lions: Echoes from the Mahabharata from which Akram Khan's piece was later inspired. And Akram Khan uncovered the character of Amba in his production of Until the Lions but I was more interested in Shikhandi. And I went with this curiosity to Karthika and she came into that process.

We had four weeks of development. The first couple weeks was about finding forms which connected to the expression of queerness in contemporary society, like drag. Equally we also researched forms that came out of the Mahabharata, like Kathakali and even Terukoothu. We investigated those forms and brought them into the room. At times, artists and drag artists came into the conversation, and they had a go at devising exercises. Slowly, we were starting to find the tone of the piece.

We then [undertook] a solid two-week development process. Four actors with different experiences and skill sets – from drag artists and musicians to physical, textual and visual theatre artists – played in a room, trying to find different narrative arcs. They also generated material with the friction.

I really didn't want to turn this project into a tragedy. Because a lot of the narratives around queerness already end in tragedies. I wanted to break this kind of like Angels in America heaviness. You know, a play is a way of having conversations. One of the major drivers in development was to find forms that brought lightness. How do we keep fluidity? How do we keep lightness while telling a story – especially one that can be incredibly tense at times. How do we find lightness, levity, breath, expanse?

After making weeks of discoveries, it became apparent that our positionality inside the production needed to change. At that moment, I was writing and being a devisor and potentially performing the work. By the end, it became quite clear that if we were going to play with the forms that that my body knows well like Kathakali, I needed to take a backwards step so I could actually share with a bit more distance in the room. Also, at that moment, we finalised that Karthika would write the work. And myself directing. We now have a four-person show with a set that is entirely mobile produced by Performing Lines WA.

J

It's still sort of evolving, definitely. With every show, I'm making a lot of discoveries about how to work, where I like to work, where my strengths or weaknesses are as well. Some of them only reveal themselves when a show goes in front of the audience. That's the crazy thing about it.

Some only come after two years after you've done the show, and you kind of go, oh, it's interesting, what was happening there, and you sense the distance, you sense that you've grown in some ways. With Maa, my early [2017 dance-theatre] work I guess the interesting thing is I was trying to find a language that was inside my body. I was also trying to find my collaborators in that show. People that I would work well with as well as systems and processes that I wanted to learn or develop because I had just come out of finishing my studies in Paris where I was mixing mime with an ancient art form [Kathakali].

What happens when you're just working with what you know? That was a little bit frustrating. I was trying to find a balance between body, language and text in the writing. But I found it very difficult to articulate a work of that sort in the context of Australian theatre. I mean if there wasn’t text, people didn't really believe that it could be a story. And even for me, coming from India, when people ask me, oh, are you a dancer? Or are you an actor? For me it's not about being a dancer or an actor, we learn both of those skills together – the art of Abhinaya – and it's something that goes hand in hand. It is the amalgamation that is used to convey a story, to embody character.

When I was making my last work Children of the Sea (2021), I struggled a lot with trying to communicate this idea to people. At one point, I had to decide, if I wanted this project to be realised, I needed to lean into text. That's where I brought in a dramaturg to lead a verbatim-inspired process. I collected the interviews and I wanted to devise it in a physical way. But to put it on paper was incredibly challenging. Also, I found it very challenging to write funding applications for it. But as soon as I moved to a form of writing that everyone here understood, then those obstacles were much easier to get past and put on this work.

In all honesty, where does the dance-theatre practitioner go in Australia? Which company has a legacy of producing such work? Who really understands and cares for what physical theatre or dance-theatre or that situated practice is? There were very few companies in Australia who really understood me. It was a great challenge to overcome that and I leaned heavily on text in my early days. As I leaned on text, I leaned on people who knew text really well. I learned the process of collecting lots of material, mining material and surfacing the story through that labour.

And it was [script developer] Louise Gough in a meeting actually who mentioned that it that could be quite interesting to just see the journey from Indonesia to Australia, just the seven days that people are on boat, and the play takes place on the boat and traces how the children are transformed in it during that journey. And as soon as I had that structure, it was actually quite easy to write the rest of the play. My process was to start from a point of very heavy research, which kind of went from 2016 to 2019 and then in 2019 work toward transforming it into a play.

During this time, I got invested in community groups here and started running workshops. I was doing these theatre workshops for children and they were having a lot of fun. And it was from those workshops that the idea of actually having children in the work came to me. At first, we were going, oh, how we gonna go about the casting? And I think three or four workshops down I was kind of going, wow, I think some kids from this group can actually be telling the story. And that’s how the casting choices for Children of the Sea were made.

J

The relationship around an artist and a producer at first was a bit of a jolting experience. I didn't really know what people expected of me or even what I expected of people. I think power is an interesting thing, where the producer and artist relationship is concerned. I felt that I was coming in as an artist, I had an inherent gratitude to my producing organisation. But it was always tilted. I was always thankful, I’m thankful, I'm thankful for all the opportunities that I'm getting. And thank you for doing all the work.

It can be really lonely to back yourself as an artist when you are working with a producer for the first time.

In the early days of Children of the Sea, I told Rachael Whitworth at Performing Lines WA that I actually want space here so that I couldn’t be restricted and could try a lot of different things. This has to be a moment that we just unleash. We have the money and we use this as a time for play. We'll make decisions after this.

At the end of it because we had that room and that understanding that the producer was going to hold the space and was going to be backing the ideas and that experimentation and that playing—wild play not a tamed version of playing. At the end of the week, as artist and producer we both agreed there is something in the idea we want to pursue. But coming to that point was a huge journey.

But once we came to it, I felt safe to go, okay, I can continue taking such risks and expanding on ideas and also play as an artist. And that Rachel and Zainab and Performing Lines will have the back of this project. After that point, any sort of feedback that came was actually super helpful. I really benefited from it. But to get feedback before you've established trust is not really the most helpful thing at times. So that process was how we found our artist-producer relationship. It’s one that became really solid that’s continuing with Beneath the Music. Of course, now things have slightly changed as my company Encounter is also in the picture.

That is a great point. I mean it does feel like you’re doing five or six jobs at a time and if I had a choice, I’d prefer to be doing one job at a time. You know, just to be a director of a show or just to be an actor in a show. It's never been that for me in Perth. And that's why I would travel to do shows like Counting and Cracking (2019) where I was just an actor or even here doing Mahabharata (2023) as an actor. It’s a way to just focus on my craft and bring something interesting. But often in Perth, you are doing multiple things at once, there is simply no other way.