A strangely rhythmic charpoy, two men in their bare minimums and a deeply unsettling feeling that you are in someone’s private space – when you watch a performance as bold and imaginative as Queen Size in a city like Ahmedabad, you know the message of the art has been well conveyed.
An ode to Nishit Saran’s piece ‘Why My Bedroom Habits Are Your Business’, against Section 377 of the Indian Penal Code that criminalises homosexuality, choreographer Mandeep Raikhy’s new presentation, Queen Size is a timely piece in the current Indian context.
Raikhy put two brilliant performers together in a semi-dark room and made them artistically go through the grind of what may ensue when two male bodies meet.
A graduate of Laban Dance Center, London, Raikhy was Saran’s partner at the time the late filmmaker had written this in 2000 – one of the most relevant pieces on the subject.
Raikhy had soon left India to study dance, and got back a few years later to find the LGBTQ debate stronger than ever. Between 2015 and 2016, the community found itself in the middle of a tussle – both political and legal – and Raikhy chose to create this artwork because it seemed to him that the time was now or never.
The show that runs for 2 hours in loops of 30 minutes each is as physically strenuous as it is out of the box. The two dancers, Lalit Khatana and Parinay Mehra, use up all the space they can get in the room, to dance out what they have processed as intimacy – even while the audience sit lined across the four walls of the room.
Success of the work, they say, can be defined when someone so much as moves.
Lalit is a dance major from Salzburg, who has also worked in films like Haider and Rangoon.
The choreographer has been deeply committed to take his work to a number of cities, big and small. From Delhi and Mumbai, to Imphal, Aizawl, Shillong, Guwahati, Pune, Chandigarh, Kolkata, Ahmedabad, Chennai, Bangalore and Sonepat, Queen Size has broken ice everywhere with rave reviews.
Delhi-based Parinay, who has been performing for a decade, tells me that this is his third piece with Raikhy. About the subject of sexuality and the criticism it has always faced, he says,
Interestingly, the rehearsals for the piece were in themselves a revelation for Lalit, who was struggling hard to connect with the concept.
A lot of art that talks of queer identities is making its presence felt in the Indian context. While movies have had a fairer chance to depict the community through powerful films like Deepa Mehta’s Fire, Nishit Saran’s Summer in my Veins and Rituparno Ghosh’s Chitrangada among some of the well-known ones, live performance is slowly making a mark. In that sense, Queen Size gets a tip of the hat for its unique efforts.
As Raikhy says –
(Runa Mukherjee Parikh has written on women, culture, social issues, education and animals, with The Times of India, India Today and IBN Live. When not hounding for stories, she can be found petting dogs, watching sitcoms or travelling. A big believer in ‘animals come before humans’, she is currently struggling to make sense of her Bengali-Gujarati lifestyle in Ahmedabad.)
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