Skin: Performance with a purpose

While toying with the idea of their next production; the troupe of High Kicks All Girl Dance Ensemble was considering a seamless, non-stop performance addressing discrimination. Their performance last year was about mental illness, displacement and women in history — it was a triple bill that they got to speak on. So while some of the dancers, along with Aparnaa Nagesh, director and choreographer of these productions, were discussing the matter of ‘being comfortable in your own skin’, the conversation led to race, religion, gender and sexuality so through their dance, they wish to question stereotypes surrounding these issues.

Aparna, who’s also written the script for this latest show titled SKIN, says children are a great reference point apart from intensive research. “I work a lot with school students and while interacting with them and my niece, I observed that kids, when they see someone of a different colour, it will be out of natural curiosity; the question of good or bad doesn’t come to the mind. It’s only social and manmade constructs over time, say for example between the age of 5 and 15, where perceptions change on race, religion, gender and sexuality,” she says. The performance speaks of inter-sectionality among the four realms and will be related to games children play in a playground. “To me, the concept of inclusion seems quite simple because I look at everything from a four-year-old’s perspectives,” she adds.

Additionally, when parents or society design rigid roles for their sons or daughters, gender becomes a performance, feels the danseuse. “Because we don’t talk about it much, I hear young boys say ‘pink is a colour for girls, we don’t want to wear it’. I mean, who got to decide which colours who should wear or what they should play with?” To resonate with these opinions, SKIN will see the artistes playing around with colours and various elements to depict the underlying message of the show. “This way, audience can understand what we’re trying to say and additionally, there is enough narration to thread all the concepts together,” shares Aparnaa. 

The 75-minute performance will see primarily contemporary dance interspersed with elements of physical theatre and street moves, making it an experimental contemporary dance theatre show. She says, “As for the music, we’ll be playing around with an amalgam of konnakol-based fusion, Sanskrit trance, Arabic and Israeli music, classic Vivaldi and a whole bunch of other things — all recorded, not live. Ultimately, the idea is to spread the message that the colours and anything external do not matter at all and that we should, ideally, look at each other as ‘people’,” she concludes.

To witness Skin - a dance theatre production by High Kicks, visit Alliance Française of Madras, 24 College Road, Nungambakkam, on September 9. Two shows, at 4 pm and 7 pm, will be performed.