Ajay Chhabra created The Wedding Party with Simmy Gupta
(Picture: Daniel Hambury/Stella Pictures Ltd)The director behind a Bollywood-inspired royal wedding tribute for the Queen’s jubilee said it is as much a tribute to his own mother as to Her Majesty.
Ajay Chhabra created The Wedding Party with Simmy Gupta, his joint artistic director at performance group Nutkhut. It features 250 performers dancing around a six-metre-high four-tiered wedding cake as it travels the route of the platinum jubilee pageant on Sunday June 5.
Mr Chhabra, who grew up in Thamesmead, said his approach to the party was in some ways a reaction to the worst days of the Covid pandemic and the death of his mother, Shardi, in the first week of lockdown.
He said: “I’m proud to be British, I’m proud of our identity. My mum was from Fiji, my dad is from India and they met in London in the Sixties and I am a product of that. Despite the challenges that we all face, there is something special about London bringing people together. We just thought you know what everyone is missing is a party.”
To prepare for the performance Mr Chhabra and his team dug into the royal archives at Windsor and learned about the actual wedding cake made for the 1947 marriage of the then Princess Elizabeth and Prince Philip.
Mr Chhabra said the “truly inclusive” performance needed to grab the attention of the watching audience, saying: “If someone in Tuvalu or someone in Teddington is watching this, if we don’t capture their imagination in five or 10 seconds we’ve lost them so we need energy, we need colour, we need momentum. Is this a tribute to the Queen or my mum?
“Well, I think it is a tribute to all women who hold families together and stand the test of time.”
