Preethi Athreya’s ‘Rubber Girl’ is a tribute to the cabaret

Preethi Athreya in Rubber Girl
| Photo Credit: G5A

Movement is any dance’s motor. But when it comes to cabaret, a theatrical form that also features music, song, recitation or drama, a dash of oomph is also a requisite. 

This weekend at the Black Box, a unique black-chair multi-functional space that seats around 165, G5A presents plenty of all that makes cabaret memorable in Rubber Girl by Preethi Athreya.

G5A produces and co-creates interdisciplinary and multidisciplinary work often seen as experimental, and Preethi has been part of its In Residence programme, a production series that creates space for practitioners to explore their craft and expression and refine their practice. The work, which is grounded in traditional and contemporary performance methods, is then hosted over a period. 

Preethi is a contemporary dancer based in Chennai who also trained in Bharatanatyam. After a post-graduate degree in Dance Studies from the Laban Dance Centre, London, she uses dance as an agent of change, constantly trying to free it from the strictures of more traditional dance practices. It is this blue-print that Preethi employs in Rubber Girl, a 57-minute performance where she looks at cabaret through different angles.

“Rubber Girl was the name given to Cuckoo Moray, an Anglo-Indian actress and cabaret dancer, who peppered many Hindi films of the 1940s and 1950s with her graceful moves,” says Pravin Kannanur, a Chennai-based multidisciplinary artiste overseeing the dramaturgy and technical direction of the performance.  

“But Cuckoo Moray is not the subject itself. The pretext is the idea of the cabaret. Preethi will explore this idea, what it was in pre-war Europe, Edith Piaf’s torch ballads (laments on unrequited love) and how the German playwright Bertolt Brecht drew from the cabaret, among others. Cabaret allowed for a certain challenging of the status quo, the governing aesthetic of the time. It also challenged the political. The work also references the cabaret sequences in Indian films. Cuckoo’s moniker of the ‘rubber girl’ looks at erasure on the one hand, and the polyvalence of this person on the other,” says Pravin. 

Rubber Girl has the structure of a travelogue, but it is not a history lesson or a linear production. “It juxtaposes the dance bars that were taken to court in India and how the cabaret has morphed into the discotheque space and other legitimate spaces. The idea is introduced through well-known songs such as ‘Mera naam chin chin chu’,” adds Pravin. 

In the performance, Preethi as a contemporary dancer-choreographer references identity and rebellion and how folk forms were incorporated and hyper-sexualised when they were translated for screen. 

Preethi Athreya in Rubber Girl
| Photo Credit:
G5A

Music for the performance is by Chennai-based composer and bass guitarist Paul Jacob who has spent a lifetime empowering folk artistes. “He has reconstructed certain iconic songs,” says Pravin. “The tone of Rubber Girl is quite enjoyable. The choice of costumes by Preethi ranges from a sequined red dress, to a plastic sheet. Lighting design is by Gurleen Judge.”

Rubber Girl came out of research undertaken at the Centre National de la Danse, Pantin and Cite des Artes, Paris in 2022 and was developed with assistance from the Alliance Francaise of Madras. “A new production, it also references the Supreme Court judgment on dance bars in India and characters from film and culture. It’s a fun piece, especially for women,” says Pravin.

Tickets are priced at ₹750 for performances at 5pm and 7.30pm at G5A Warehouse G-5/A, Laxmi Mills Estate, Shakti Mills Lane, Mahalaxmi West, Worli, Mumbai on May 31 and June 1. Look up district.in for details