A New Performance Piece

I have been working on a new performance piece. Earlier this month, I got an opportunity to present it as a work in progress at "Madras-Chennai Local's" event "Dancers - Separate and Together." Now that I know the piece works, I am working on developing it further. It is now taking me to strange and new places, and I am loving it absolutely! A video of this performance is HERE.  

I am very grateful to Mridangist Adyar Sri K Gopinath and Veena vidwan Sri L Ramakrishnan for making it all work!

Lalitha Venkat at Narthaki.com had this to say about the performance: “The most interesting was a short theatre piece by Aniruddhan Vasudevan, who chose to portray the Pandava brother Arjuna in his disguise as Brhannala, the dance teacher/ eunuch in the court of King Virata, in the well-known epic Mahabharatha…. Aniruddh entered wearing a wrap around skirt and traipsed around the stage. Through a perky script, coy female movements alternating with strong male moves, he was entertaining and held the audience attention throughout. Strains of the Veena and percussion at appropriate moments provided unobtrusive and apt accompaniment. This is the first presentation of his experimental piece and worth elaborating into a larger presentation.”

In a review that a member of the audience sent the organizers of the event, s/he had this to say about my work: “aniruddhan vasudevan was a revelation, mixing and matching a startling repertoire of the classical and the modern, of theatre and dance. the arjuna-sairandhri story brought to life the shadowy area of uncertain or unacknowledged sexuality and carried the audience with him right through.”