Pickle Factory Season 5: Using dance to create spaces for collective healing
Summary
The performances in the fifth edition of Pickle Factory touch upon themes ranging from media manipulation, agency and loss to femininity, architecture of the body, and access to the arts
Each year, the Pickle Factory Dance Foundation—an artist-led not-for-profit in Kolkata— creates homes for dance in repurposed spaces. This annual event celebrates its fifth season this year. Titled ‘Holding Space’, it is a call to action and “an invitation to revisit what we stand for through the spaces we imagine, birth and experience together," stated the curatorial note. These spaces are both symbolic and literal in terms of physical areas, realms of hope and faith, plural and inclusive spaces, and more. The edition, which has been held in three schedules between February and March, across cities culminates today at the Alipore Museum, Kolkata, with the performance, ‘Shaiva Koothu’, a work that pushes the boundaries of Koodiyattam using a Tamizh text.
According to Vikram Iyenger, a Kolkata-based choreographer, curator, arts researcher and founder-director of the Pickle Factory Dance Foundation, believes that the annual event transforms unusual venues into performance spaces. This year, the team has worked mainly in the Alipore Museum, and the venue area has included a cosy community hub with little nooks to read books from the library, draw, paint, have conversations and just relax. The overarching idea of ‘Holding Space’—through performances such as ‘Can You Read my Body’ by tanzbar_bremen about the presence and absence of different bodies in space touching upon the topic of belonging performed by dancers with and without disabilities—has been to create areas of collective nurture and healing.
“Such spaces are fragile and vulnerable, in constant need of protection… . In a scenario where we are constantly being asked to be faster, higher, stronger, better—often to the detriment of ourselves, our societies, our ecologies, and our planet—Pickle Factory Season 5 suggests we pause and hold space with and for each other, and the world we can actually grow into. With gentleness, with grace, with generosity, with gusto," states the note. In an interview with Lounge, Iyengar discusses learnings from past editions, what kind of spaces that we need to persistently re-create, nurture and hold on to, and more. Edited excerpts:
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How does ‘Holding Space’ look at the idea of 'spaces of solidarity and inclusiveness' both literally and metaphorically?
The curatorial idea of holding space emerged both from the artists and performances we were programming, and the uncertain times we are going through. Especially in the arts sector in India, the levels of precarity currently are extremely high. The only way to survive and push through is to forge solidarities across the social sector, of which the arts is a vital component. The season does that quite literally, bringing together partners who work in performing and visual arts, literature, education, media, therapy and counselling, gender issues, disability and more. Along with this we have the participation of cultural houses, venues and corporate bodies. So the demographics we have brought together to collectively support this season is very diverse and inclusive.
The themes of the various performances explore different ideas ranging from media manipulation, agency, grief and loss to femininity, architecture of the body, access to the arts, and more. Conceptually, we grouped the programming under three weeks themed power, people, and magic. Because when power and people come together, magic happens.
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What have been the learnings from past editions in the ways that you revisit ideas of plurality, inclusiveness and healing?
We have come a long way since Season 1 in 2018 when Pickle Factory was still evolving an identity. Over the years, it has become clear to us that arts and community spaces must exist together and inform each other. We are convinced that dance can, does—and must—happen anywhere, with anyone, for anyone. And it must transform everyone and everything it touches. Our fundamental values of creating access to the arts, foregrounding plural and diverse voices, and bringing arts and communities together in sustainable and environmentally aware ways emerge from this conviction.
How has this season’s programming evolved from these learnings?
From quite a niche first season featuring mainly contemporary performance, our new editions have expanded to define dance and movement in very broad terms. Our programming includes classical and contemporary dance, physical theatre, circus, puppet theatre, martial art—anything that involves the moving body. Apart from the featured performances, we take artists into different circumstances and communities to ensure that they interact with diverse audiences in different ways. This has led us to work with not-for-profit and mainstream schools, community clubs, media and technical institutes, culture clubs and many more organisations. Inevitably, this opens up access to the arts and the artists through many different perspectives and experiences. Taking the arts to communities that are affected by trauma or loss is also a deeply healing process.
This season, in particular, we programmed two events with Solene Weinachter from Scotland to share thoughts and experiences on the subject of grief, loss and death. ‘After All’ explores the death rituals we have, the ones we’ve lost, and the ones that need inventing. Through a series of humorous, impassioned re-enactments of the funerals of those she’s loved, as well as imagining her own, Solène melds dance, comedy, storytelling and theatre to ask: What happens in the end? Skillfully comedic and emotionally introspective, her use of choreography and text had the audience waver between peals of laughter and silent tears. Artist-facilitated exchanges like these can often create a space of solace and comfort for participants.
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How does the body become a canvas for exploring themes of gender, loss and mortality, and sense of community?
Adishakti from Auroville presented ‘Urmila’, a thought-provoking play that delves into the complex ethical and gender-related issues, which have been woven into the fabric of society throughout history. The play centres on the character of Urmila from the Ramayana, whose life is dramatically altered when her husband Lakshmana commands her to sleep for the 14 years of his absence. This deceptively simple directive raises profound questions about autonomy, consent, and the price individuals, especially women, have paid for their obedience throughout time. In Adishakti’s version, Urmila refuses to sleep thus claiming back agency over her own decisions. In the performance, we see the profound physical effects of prolonged sleeplessness on Urmila’s body as the performer explores different modes of moving to denote this condition.
The Indo-Swiss project ‘Ef-femininity’ examines the concepts of femininity, hyper-femininity and effeminacy by a gender-diverse ensemble of performers from Switzerland and India. What is femininity and who owns it? Four performers come together to tell their stories rooted in different assumptions about gender identities in India that have an expansive history surpassing binary distinctions. At a particular point, Living Smile Vidya—a trans performer—reveals the scars of a botched surgery, where we see just lumps of flesh instead of the breasts. This is probably the most obvious visual, physical impact of the gender question on the body.
Kapila Venu’s ‘Shaiva Koothu’ departs from the traditional Sanskrit language of Koodiyattam and uses the sixth-century text of poetess, and devotee of Shiva, Karaikkal Ammaiyar as the source. Ammaiyar’s work challenged Brahmanical orthodoxy and embraced the ghoulish yet sacred imagery of Sangam poetry. Identifying as a Pey (demon), she danced in cremation grounds, transcending human limits. Kapila Venu brings this text and perspective to life in a radical departure from the way Koodiyattam is generally seen and performed, introducing a fresh energy into how a female character can be conceived and performed within this ancient performance tradition.
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There is an interesting exploration of movement with text, or with technology. Could you talk about the interdisciplinarity in the various performances?
Dance by nature is interdisciplinary, even if it combines only the elements of the moving body, spatial design and soundscore. However, in this edition, there are particular pieces that take interdisciplinarity to another level.
‘Shoot the Cameraman’ by AWA | As We Are from Luxembourg choreographs two live camera persons into the piece along with two dancers. What the cameras capture is simultaneously transmitted live onto the projection screen behind the performers, offering the audience a permanent double reading of what is happening—what they see unfolding on stage, and the view that the camera chooses to show them on screen. Confronted with these multiple perspectives, which become more and more layered and more and more disturbing, the audience is forced to consider what they understand as truth and what they understand as fabrication. Can anyone ever have the whole picture? And how do these images of truth we are fed manipulate our imaginations and attitudes.
Performers in three of the pieces use the spoken word—’Urmila’, ‘After All’, ‘Ef_femininity’. Adishakti’s work is always multidisciplinary employing movement techniques from kalaripayattu, yoga and other traditional forms, mime, text, comedy and strong visual design. ‘Urmila’ was no different, with the text specifically written for the performance. Text was also scripted for ‘After All’, and this piece continues Solene Weinachter’s experiments with dance theatre where text and movement are in constant interplay. ‘Ef_femininity’, on the other hand, drew on personal articulations of individual stories to develop their text.
