Movement is any dance’s motor. But when it comes to cabaret, a theatrical kind that additionally options music, music, recitation or drama, a sprint of oomph is additionally a requisite.
This weekend at the Black Box, a distinctive black-chair multi-functional house that seats round 165, G5A presents loads of all that makes cabaret memorable in Rubber Girl by Preethi Athreya.
G5A produces and co-creates interdisciplinary and multidisciplinary work typically seen as experimental, and Preethi has been a part of its In Residence programme, a manufacturing sequence that creates house for practitioners to discover their craft and expression and refine their follow. The work, which is grounded in conventional and modern efficiency strategies, is then hosted over a interval.
Preethi is a modern dancer based mostly in Chennai who additionally skilled in Bharatanatyam. After a post-graduate diploma in Dance Studies from the Laban Dance Centre, London, she makes use of dance as an agent of change, continually making an attempt to free it from the strictures of extra conventional dance practices. It is this blue-print that Preethi employs in Rubber Girl, a 57-minute efficiency the place she appears at cabaret by means of totally different angles.
“Rubber Girl was the name given to Cuckoo Moray, an Anglo-Indian actress and cabaret dancer, who peppered many Hindi films of the 1940s and 1950s with her graceful moves,” says Pravin Kannanur, a Chennai-based multidisciplinary artiste overseeing the dramaturgy and technical course of the efficiency.
“But Cuckoo Moray is not the subject itself. The pretext is the idea of the cabaret. Preethi will explore this idea, what it was in pre-war Europe, Edith Piaf’s torch ballads (laments on unrequited love) and how the German playwright Bertolt Brecht drew from the cabaret, among others. Cabaret allowed for a certain challenging of the status quo, the governing aesthetic of the time. It also challenged the political. The work also references the cabaret sequences in Indian films. Cuckoo’s moniker of the ‘rubber girl’ looks at erasure on the one hand, and the polyvalence of this person on the other,” says Pravin.
Rubber Girl has the construction of a travelogue, but it surely is not a historical past lesson or a linear manufacturing. “It juxtaposes the dance bars that were taken to court in India and how the cabaret has morphed into the discotheque space and other legitimate spaces. The idea is introduced through well-known songs such as ‘Mera naam chin chin chu’,” provides Pravin.
In the efficiency, Preethi as a modern dancer-choreographer references identification and revolt and the way folks types have been integrated and hyper-sexualised once they have been translated for display screen.
Preethi Athreya in Rubber Girl
| Photo Credit:
G5A
Music for the efficiency is by Chennai-based composer and bass guitarist Paul Jacob who has spent a lifetime empowering folks artistes. “He has reconstructed certain iconic songs,” says Pravin. “The tone of Rubber Girl is quite enjoyable. The choice of costumes by Preethi ranges from a sequined red dress, to a plastic sheet. Lighting design is by Gurleen Judge.”
Rubber Girl got here out of analysis undertaken at the Centre National de la Danse, Pantin and Cite des Artes, Paris in 2022 and was developed with help from the Alliance Francaise of Madras. “A new production, it also references the Supreme Court judgment on dance bars in India and characters from film and culture. It’s a fun piece, especially for women,” says Pravin.
Tickets are priced at ₹750 for performances at 5pm and seven.30pm at G5A Warehouse G-5/A, Laxmi Mills Estate, Shakti Mills Lane, Mahalaxmi West, Worli, Mumbai on May 31 and June 1. Look up district.in for particulars
Published – May 31, 2025 03:08 pm IST
