SCREENING | An Evening of Dance Film

Mau : The spirit dreams of Cheraw | Directed by Shilpika Bordoloi

The spirit dreams of Cheraw, is a performance documentary film through Cheraw(Bamboo dance)and ritual folklore, reveals the forgotten memory of the mother who dies at childbirth. The film shows a re-imagined dance of the mother spirit. Bamboo Dance was performed as a way to pacify the soul of the mother who died in childbirth. Bamboo is part of the geo-political history of Mizoram and the many other states in the North-east. Hence the loss of this intergenerational maternal memory is the crisis of culture, the climate of a place.

One with the flow | Idea by Shilpika Bordoloi

This film is about country boats made in a specific geography of Majuli island, on the Brahmaputra river that flows through Assam, India. There is a strong connection in this work with nature and the self and the community and is about this essential knowledge of boat- making passed down from generations. The film ends with this ghosa/devotional prayer which sings about the boat as a metaphor of us travelling from this life … crossing over to the unknown, to the other side. At the backdrop of the crisis of culture and climate the creation of this work is provoked by a vanishing form of boat-construction.

Biroho | Directed by Pratik Iyer, Sumedha Bhattacharyya

Biroho means duration and it also means longing. This dance film is a part of a three chapter series tracing the sense of longing between the dancer and the ghost of her grandmother through an in-situ experience of death that pivots and shifts conversation around inner grief. Through the living copy of her handwritten letter, family archival photographs of my grandmother, and the vocabulary informed by Kathak, Biroho explores a layered journey of the emotional flux experienced in the process of longing. This project is contextualised in a time-period of the pandemic, where radical shifts, transitions and moments of personal and collective loss and grief haunt us.

Dotted Bodies l Directed by Prakriti Sharda and Sagarika Debnath

Two dancers reminisce about their university’s annual production piece over a telephone call. They recall how they slowly lost control over their own bodies while performing a piece on the seven sins, supported by a dimly-lit stage and blasting speakers. With a cacophonous doom lingering beneath their movements, the dancers reenact their rehearsals from that performance. The call traces the journey behind the survival instinct of a dancer when the curtains, lights and stage morph into an echo, synonymous to the seven deadly sins.

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