On the queer side of Indian classical arts

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On the queer side of Indian classical arts: Karma Dance makes Midsumma Festival premiere with Bent Bollywood
Karma Dance: Govind Pillai and Raina Peterson

Karma Dance makes Midsumma Festival premiere with Bent Bollywood. Midsumma is Victoria’s premiere queer arts and cultural festival for and by the LGBTQIA+ communities

Karma Dance makes its 2018 Midsumma Festival debut with their original production, Bent Bollywood, an eclectic and libidinous dance show that combines the technical rigour of classical Indian dance with the camp theatrics of Bollywood.

Featuring Karma Dance Co-Artistic Directors Govind Pillai and Raina Peterson, Bent Bollywood showcases everything that is both weird and wonderful about queer performance art.

Witness the treacherous imagination of the diaspora, the postcolonial rage of the subaltern, and the exuberant lust of the queers who would have written a much better “Kama Sutra” if only they’d been asked.

Govind is one of only a few professional male practitioners of bharatanatyam, a genre of Indian classical dance expressing Hindu religious ideas and spiritual themes traditionally performed only by women.

Raina is a professional Australian practitioner of mohiniyattam, an Indian dance style that evokes a mythical enchantress of the Hindu god Vishnu who helps good prevail over evil by deploying her feminine powers.

Melbourne-based Karma Dance is a classical and contemporary dance company and teaching academy whose productions have sold out at festivals and on stages in Australia and around the world.

Get bent with these Bollywood “babes” in their moving invocation of diaspora, gender and transgression.

Midsumma Festival is Victoria’s premiere queer arts & cultural festival for and by the LGBTQIA+ communities.

When and where

  • Venue: Mechanics Institute, 270 Sydney Road, Brunswick
  • Dates & Times: 25-27 January / 31 January-3 February @ 7:30pm (1hr)
  • Tickets: Full $30 / Conc $22 / Groups (6+) $20
  • Booking & Info: midsumma.org.au/

 

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