Nithya

In my 2020 work Sacred Grooves for Secular Spaces, I made a participatory dance project led by four dancers facing the cardinal directions in a public architecture commission called MPavilion. We were hoping to answer the question: In an age where religion is both ammunition and shield, can a temporary structure offer refuge? We conducted deep, community-research and deconstructed the grammar and vocabulary of ritual practices from the many religious and spiritual traditions practiced in contemporary Australia to inform the choreographic language of the piece. For instance, we devised exercises around the weakening of the knees commonplace in major world religions. We incorporated the spiraling of whirling for transcendence in different spatial-temporal configurations. We also integrated personal rituals important to the dancers themselves into the signature of the work. The audiences were then led into a Satsang, a sanskrit term that literally translates as ‘sitting in the company of absolute truth.’ It saw artist-facilitator Jamie Marie Lewis open up a conversation with local faith leaders: a young Hindu biker priest, Australia’s first openly gay Imam and an Afrofuturist healer and storyteller. The performance ceremoniously went ahead in the final weekend before the first COVID-19 lockdowns in Australia and marked a moment in time after which the ways we gather forever changed.

We have very different work paces. One of us is a marathoner and the other is a sprinter. Zainab works within an organised structure with clear timelines and Nithya’s ideas crystallise under intense time pressure. We keep a fluid dialogue in the chunks of time between our processes and open communication is foundational rather than supplemental to our ways of working. We allow for a lot of space for dreaming so aesthetic decisions can be born of political compulsions and personal choices. As we want our works to reach hitherto unknown spaces, there is latitude and expansiveness in our rooms and an embrace of risk, even at the cost of failure. The choices we make in formal principles to interrupt hegemony are as important as the choices we make in content or narrative. This needs time for speculation, incubation, germination. In ‘Beyond the Guilt Tax,’ a 2021 article in The Point, author and pedagogue Sumana Roy writes:

Literature in the postcolonial syllabus should surprise the student and not just confirm and illustrate “theories.” This, too, should be part of the decolonising-the-syllabus mission: to dismantle the binary between postcolonial writers as content writers and Western writers as experimenters with form. Only then can we begin to address the “moralitis” of my students, which (although it might seem at first like a harmless, or even praiseworthy, condition) turns out to entail a troubling indifference to pleasure and beauty, to ananda (joy and delight), which is often the backbone of India’s modern literatures.

We remain excited by arts organisations making new work in Australia such as Marrugeku Dance Theatre, Urban Theatre Projects, CAAP, Kurinji, BLCKBIRDS, APHIDS and Sensorium Theatre. We’re equally excited by independent artists such as Jacob Boehme, Vicki Van Hout, Andrea James, Katina Olsen, Raghav Handa, Mararo Wangai and Jacob Nash. These artists, among many others, are making urgent, intersectional work from a context deeply rooted in place. They also believe there is a lot to be learnt from the self-determined processes of First Nations artists (where appropriate and applicable) and they conceptualise the artist-audience relationship as one of ceremony and witness, rather than a performer and spectator. We agree to disagree on intercultural collaborations, yet processes of making work across difference, particularly collaborations not always mediated by Whiteness remain central to our collective practice.

On taking work to audiences outside of traditional spaces

Nithya

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H_ME W_RK

On taking work to audiences outside of traditional spaces

Nithya

Table of Contents