NAIR
Bloom
Multimedia performance
Duration: 30 min
Materials: cloth, red thread, video, sound
Sound design: Nikshith Shetty
Alliance Francaise, Bangalore, IND (2018)
What does it mean, to be who you are? Are the pillars of today's society built on our personal beliefs or are they predetermined by age-old doctrines set by our ancestors? Most importantly, what kind of future are we heading towards if who we are now is something that refuses to change? There is no easy way to answer questions like this. They need to be asked all the same though. Anushka Nair, in association with Quiver Productions, asks these questions with Bloom. Bloom is a performance piece that takes a look at gender roles through the eyes of Woman, the Other, in a dystopian future and where new truths can only be voiced in the potential world of the In-Between. Bloom came to me with a sense of utmost urgency. I have always been interested in exploring the origin of our beliefs and how our society as a collective is conditioned to certain notions, especially in the context of gender. I was curious to know where and how this dichotomy began and as I was reading Simone de Beauvoir’s ‘Second sex’, a whole new world opened which gave me insight into how essential our ancestors, in particular to influential ones- philosophers like Aristotle or important scripts like the Manusmriti, are in having paved our society’s doctrines. Using the archetype of Woman, I explore and question these ideas. The dystopian setting of the performance is for me a red flag for us to reconsider our choices for our future. Bloom goes beyond gender politics and transpires into the collective and tries to bring to light the essence of us all. The essence of being human. This one-woman show grows beyond the dichotomy of genders and embraces the collective through movement, text, sound and visual media.
