Dancer, activist and performer Mallika Sarabhai has shaped a career that refuses to fit into a single frame; it is always expanding, always in motion. In Hyderabad for an Indo-Italian collaborative performance, she reflects on changing cities, changing memories and the nostalgia. Her troupe’s performance, backed by Telangana Tourism, will be staged at Shilpakala Vedika on November 21.
The performance, she says, is called ‘Meanwhile, Elsewhere’. “It is inspired by Italio Calvino’s book Invisible Cities, a favourite book of mine from the time I was 18. The person who has created the show is the artistic director of Darpana called Yadavan Chandran. We have been co-creating for over 25 years, and I have been telling him for years how exciting and relevant this book is; how it can be interpreted in so many ways and inspire. And yet, he never got around to reading it. Then, on November 1, his birthday, he walked into a bookshop in Thiruvananthapuram, and the entire display was Invisible Cities. So here we are,” she says.
Ms. Sarabhai recalls dancing in Hyderabad from the ”very beginning” of her career, “must be in ’79 or ’80,” when the city was ”different”. She reflects on how one of the cities explored in the performance is “a city of memories”, prompting questions about what truly makes a memory and what makes Hyderabad “Hyderabad” anymore.
“We are sitting in a part of Hyderabad that has very little to do with Hyderabad,” she says, asking what the city’s core means to each of us. The production examines this through 12 cities — their names and central idea borrowed from Calvino, but “nothing else is”. Everything beyond that is imagined by the director, “who has also written it, also lit it”, she adds.
She speaks of the challenges and possibilities of storytelling without speech: “How do you tell the story of destruction without a single word, through dance?”
She points to the feeling of returning after a year away and no longer recognising the city, raising questions of whether it then becomes “a city of your memories”, “a city of nostalgia” or “a city that you imagined”. Sometimes, she says, a sudden fragrance gives you “a catch in your throat”. “That is the kind of evocation the show does,” she explains.
Ms. Sarabhai describes how the reception to this avant-garde production has been unexpectedly powerful. “Meanwhile, Elsewhere was created and premiered at the Vikram Sarabhai Festival on December 28 last year. Then, by January 9, we were being asked to play it again and again,” she says. At one performance, delegates from 30 or 40 countries, including the head of urban planning for UNESCO and the chief urban planner for Amsterdam, taking part in a major international conference happened to be present. They watched the show and “held our hands”, telling her that everything they speak about — the destruction of the earth and the seas, climate change, the endless lectures and films — had been conveyed in 100 minutes through the production.
On the national tour that followed, the emotional impact continued to surface in surprising ways. She recalls people coming up to her deeply moved, including designer Sabyasachi. “He held me and said, ‘Mallika, in 20 years, I have been unable to cry. And I wept through your show. Thank you. You have put me back in touch with my humanity’. So something seems to get through,” she shares. For her, reactions like this indicate that something in the work is breaking through the distance modern life has created, a distance so great that “we don’t even remember that there was another time,” except for those old enough to recall it.
Ask her how the performance plays with memories and she smiles and says, “You would have to come and watch it.” What the production does hold, she explains, is the past and the attempt to show “what is evoking this emotion”. As a performer who has done a lot of the choreography, she continues to discover new elements every time she performs it. “This is true of all of us actors,” she adds. The work is so multi-layered that depending on one’s mood, circumstances, or the week they have had, “another sentence or another fragrance or another image” touches a different part of them.
In Ahmedabad, where they have now staged around 15 shows, some audience members have returned three or four times. “They say every time they find a different layer,” she says.
Published – November 20, 2025 01:17 am IST
