Commissions

Over the years, women’s work songs historically construct and reproduce their repetitive drudgery and everyday rhythms–further becoming vehicles of the construction and reproduction of gender identity. Accompanying their work with singing, accentuating the rhythms created by the everyday work. With dancers identified from specific geographical locations, this production will demonstrate the spatial, linguistic, and thematic range of women’s work by platforming music and dance forms in various languages, such as the Ovi from Maharashtra, weaving songs from Punjab, the Portuguese Fado from Goa, and songs of migration and separation from Bihar.

The performance will construct interconnected spaces, both domestic and public, in which women’s lives and work unfold. It will consider the loneliness of this work but also the contexts it offers for women to experience fun, friendship, and the divine. It offers a glimpse into the richly textured lives of everyday women through their conceptualisation of and relationship to work in their own words and voices.

Three artists and three dance forms—Ottan Thullal, Bharatanatyam and Kathak—come together in a journey with myth, music and movement, combining elements of theatre, percussion and other allied forms. Through this confluence of art forms and artists and the journey we collectively undertake, the performance aims to uphold a certain awareness of our actions, of what we do with our lives and our art. What must change, and what needs to stay the same?