Is it audacious for a 63-year-old woman to talk publicly about sexual desire? It’s audacious enough for a 63-year-old woman to front her own solo dance show, the art form most associated with youth, never mind witnessing a grandmother luxuriating in sensation, her body twitching and pulsing, her desire fluttering. There’s nothing salacious about Forbidden. Leading Indian kathak performer Aditi Mangaldas has created work that is earnest and sensitive albeit frank, and quietly outraged at the double standard afforded to men’s and women’s sexuality. Forbidden is a fearless picture of woman as both object and fount of desire.
The New Delhi-based choreographer has been schooled in kathak dance since childhood, but she makes work that uses her classical roots within a contemporary dance-theatre idiom. There are three sections: the awakening of desire, “playing the game” and then setting fire to expectations of femininity. The first is the most classical, Mangaldas dances with sharp lines and flourish, spiralling around the stage in tight spins. Her gestures depict a flower blooming, a girl’s curves forming, her senses stirring as expressive fingers flicker. But we also see her hands over her mouth, shocked or censored, then repeatedly grabbing her body carelessly, turning something natural shameful.
Later she reads text inspired by the Kama Sutra, on eating mango leaves to freshen your breath, or the allure of wearing nine strings of pearls, diktats to woman to make themselves desirable. The shimmering ankle bells she wears turn into bodily adornments, but also perhaps shackles.
With just Mangaldas on stage, lighting by the masterful Michael Hulls and a score by Nicki Wells merging Indian and global sounds, they create a world that’s heady, hazy, sensuous and sometimes unsettling. When Mangaldas takes control of her narrative, in angry red-hued light, we see her hands make that same delicate flower-blooming gesture, but she then tosses it to one side. She becomes increasingly in touch with her animal self.
Mangaldas isn’t asking to shut down men’s desires, but to embrace women’s, and while there are lulls in the dance – not every moment is riveting – hers feels like an important voice, certainly in her cry to strike out shame. It’s a refined but radical image of a post-menopausal woman confronting oppression and embracing pleasure.
Forbidden is at Northern Stage, Newcastle, on 20 October
