A little ahead of the cell where Nehru was imprisoned, just behind the one where poet Kazi Nazrul Islam was incarcerated, and bookended between the wards that housed less important prisoners, there stands a sprawling banyan tree in Kolkata’s historic Alipore Jail, now a museum. Buffeted by March gusts, dry leaves float down from it to the ground and sometimes, fireflies rise up. Only a lamp with three wicks light up the darkness.
Kapila Venu could not have found a better setting than this to play a ghoul revelling in the eerie interplay of life and death in a cremation ground. A koodiyattam artiste with wrenchingly powerful emotive skills, Kapila is pushing boundaries with her latest work – Shaiva Koothu. Koodiyattam is a Sanskrit ritual theatre form from Kerala with a history of 2,000 years. But Kapila has opted to set her work to a 6th-century Tamil text, Thiruvalangattu Mootha Thiruppadhikam, written by Karaikkal Ammaiyar, one of the only three women in the early-medieval sect of Saivite mystics, the Nayanmars.
The Shaiva Koothu unravelling under the banyan tree is a visceral work that bends every formula about piety, beauty and gender. Kapila enacts how Ammaiyyar sees herself in her pursuit of otherworldly devotion – a terrifying pey (possessed) wandering the dark worlds that Shiva inhabits. Her face is a mask of pain and ardour as she portrays gore, madness and, in one startling sequence, some stylised flesh eating. As if on cue, the tinny resonance of the mizhavu drum that accompanies Kapila manages to set off a startled stray dog somewhere in the vicinity.
For Kapila, who is always in search of new audiences for her art that is often dismissed as archaic and elite, the Alipore courtyard with the banyan tree was a dream space. “My performance is centred around the wilderness of the cremation ground, which is a spiritual place for Ammaiyar,” she said. “It is such a carefully designed platform, especially with the banyan tree, the light and space, and with the audiences sitting close and around. I often end up performing on badly organised big proscenium spaces, so I am genuinely touched by how mindfully this was set up.”
The idea of an unorthodox stage is not novel for The Pickle Factory, which hosted the koodiyattam this year as part of its annual festival, Holding Space. The avant garde Kolkata hub for dance and movement practices has been taking the arts to accessible public spaces for nearly a decade now. Flyovers, bazaar streets, abandoned cinema halls, tram depots, rooftops and homes – anything that makes for an unpredictable venue for dance is its idea of an ideal setting.
“Sanitised spaces where we are used to watching dance have become safe to the level of dullness today,” said The Pickle Factory’s founder Vikram Iyengar. “But in common public domains, you don’t know what the space will throw at you as an artiste. It brings an immediacy to the art because the artiste has to respond to it. Dance has lost its essential connect because we are busy dancing for the gods; but without reaching out to the audience the performance circle is never complete.”
The Pickle Factory makes for a radical departure from established ideas of dance in many ways. The first difference is its industrial name. The second is its diverse work. Iyengar, a student of the legendary kathak dancer Rani Karna, started with a classical foundation but the organisation now embraces all movement forms – traditional, modern, collaborative, physical theatre, multimedia, puppet, circus, among others. And the final difference of course is its use of repurposed spaces, and the general avoidance of the large auditorium and the plush, distant, forbidding boundary it draws between people and performers.
Just the night before Shaiva Koothu was performed in the Alipore courtyard, the stage was the long hall that once housed petty prisoners. Can you read my body? was a marvellous production crafted with a cast of mixed-ability artistes drawn from India and Germany and choreographed by Tomas Bunger of Tanzbar Bremen, a German company that pulls people from all backgrounds. The corridor became what they imagined as the catwalk of life, where the staccato stage movements favoured by the fashion world became question marks about how inclusive our world is in these trying times.
At both events, audiences packed the special venues, with tickets sold out for every performance.
Theatre traditions
Performer and curator Paramita Saha has been a part of The Pickle Factory since its inception. She believes that introducing audiences to dance in what she calls “dance curious” spaces, where you least expect it, is a disruptive idea in a city that has a dedicated theatre audience but a somewhat diffident dance audience.
“Dance has been in the public space in Kolkata since the early 2000s but no company or initiative was able to build a narrative around it,” said Saha, who also co-founded the dance organisation Artsforward. “But here at The Pickle Factory, we were prancing around the city, from rooftops to under flyovers with dance conversations, collaborations and performances. This, supported by year-long programming in small and big ways to bring more audiences into dance, has helped build what we call a gentle movement to get more bottoms on seats and more feet on the ground.”
It is not that Kolkata is unused to witnessing performing arts in unexpected public spaces. Arts writer and theatre scholar Ananda Lal points to the street theatre traditions of the city that go back to the experiments of Indian People’s Theatre Association and legends like Utpal Dutt in the 1950s. Two decades later, there was Badal Sircar and his idea of Third Theatre that, Lal points out, began as angan mancha, a non-proscenium indoor space like a courtyard with an intimate audience.
“On weekends, late in the evening sometimes, he [Sircar] would hold performances in the western corner of Curzon Park, near the tram depot. Office-goers leaving work would stop by, becoming something of a captive audience,” said Lal. “IPTA’s street theatre with its landmark production, Nabanna, on the Bengal famine was a big breakthrough for the group. At least 90% of the theatre we now see in the city derived from that movement begun by IPTA.”
There are, he says, at least 10 non-proscenium indoor theatre spaces in the city that function like black boxes and even those run a full house often. To theatre groups and dancers that complain of the lack of available spaces, he says, community spaces are the way to go.
Which is pretty much what The Pickle Factory is trying to do. “Who can afford auditoriums anyway?” Iyengar asked. But beyond that there is a clear ideology to what the hub does.
It was in 2013 that The Pickle Factory grew out of an idea that took root in Iyengar’s stint in an arts management fellowship. He had collaborated with German choreographer-dancer Sasha Waltz for a closed production in a large north Kolkata home. His fellowship seconded him to her again. It involved working in a studio repurposed from a pumping station along the river Spree in Berlin.
“It struck me that there are so many places like this in Kolkata waiting for a creative lease,” he said.
When it came to picking a name, Iyengar wanted something that is symbolic of the city he is rooted in. “Calcutta’s history is about labour, and labour rights,” he said. “We never look at dance as labour, blood, sweat and tears. But like a factory, dance too is about physical labour, outside of this idea of it being high art.”
In its very first festival season, the centre staged an event at the abandoned and half-burnt Gem, a single-screen cinema theatre in the crowded Entally market area in Kolkata. A hall that was expressly built to show 70-mm Sholay, and later gutted, it remained an integral snapshot of the city even in its devastated state. This then became the setting for the dance and movement work of four Indian artists – Padmini Chettur, Daminee Benny Basu, Preethi Athreya and Kapila Venu.
Two annual seasons of The Pickle Factory went online during the Covid-19 lockdown. Once the pandemic was over, the 2024 edition went radically public – away from the digital screens that had become our only window to the world – with a three-day weekend event staged under a flyover in New Town.
Leap Through took dance in broad daylight into the metro’s throbbing streets that never know any peace or quiet. It featured contemporary dancers Prashant More and Somya Kautia along with dancers of Austria’s CieLaroque and diverse performers from Kolkata’s dance community.
“We did not announce the event but we had 200-300 stand and watch every day,” recalled Iyengar. “There were people from the hovels, small scattered farms in the locality, cyclists, car and van drivers. We gave an open call for anyone to walk in and dance and a young girl came forward, all of 10. These were people who would never enter a formal auditorium even if they were asked to.”
The same year, Hear and Now was a participatory event under the flyover – it invited the audience to pick up its own choice piece of music and join the Austrian troupe for a piece of structured improvisation. About 40 people across ages joined in for an hour-long performance. The music was invariably Bollywood, which opened up gates of participation but the choreography was anything but filmi. And all this while, the roar of cars and buses continued unabated.
There is, says Iyengar, a delight in catching dance in unexpected spaces. In a pop-up performance, for instance, on Chitpur Road with its lanes dedicated to guilds and trades, with a tea stall and its random collection of audience, and the children walking by. “It raises the question: who are we dancing for and what do we expect?” said Iyengar. “For a change, we are not the only centre of attention – it is a good thing for a dancer’s ego.”
The dance foundation is certain that it does not want to be classified as “contemporary” because of its unconventional approach, but margam (traditional classical repertoire) is not its area of interest. The push is to rethink dance and movement – Maya Krishna Rao’s stunning work on morality, Loose Women, or Aditi Mangaldas reworking the Krishna lore and Surjit Nongmeikapam’s abstraction rooted in Manipuri form.
But The Pickle Factory does not want to be bullheaded either about ideal dance spaces. Earlier in March, it staged two outstanding performances at the GD Birla Sabhaghar in Kolkata because they needed the sophisticated stagecraft that only an auditorium can ensure – Adishakti’s path-breaking movement work on a Ramayana myth, Urmila, and Shoot the Cameraman, by As We Are From Luxembourg, on the uneasy relationship digital media creates for our identities as social beings.
“It is not that we don’t work in formal spaces but we do have a propensity for architecture that says something,” said Iyengar. “There are magical spaces just waiting to be seen.”
Malini Nair is a culture writer and senior editor based in New Delhi. She can be reached at writermalini@gmail.com.
