Mallika Sarabhai’s ‘shifting cities’ act set for Hyderabad stage on November 21
Dancer, activist and artist Mallika Sarabhai has navigated a career that refuses to fit into a single box; always expanding, always in motion. He reflects on changing cities, changing memories and nostalgia for an Indo-Italian collaborative performance in Hyderabad. His group’s performance, supported by Telangana Tourism, will be staged at Shilpakala Vedika on November 21.
He says the name of the performance is ‘Meanwhile, Elsewhere’. “Inspired by Italio Calvino’s book Invisible Cities, My favorite book since I was 18. The person who created the show is Darpana’s artistic director, Yadavan Chandran. We have been creating together for over 25 years, and I have been telling him for years how exciting and relevant this book is; How it can be interpreted and inspired in so many different ways. However, he still did not have the opportunity to read it. Later, on his birthday, November 1, he walked into a bookstore in Thiruvananthapuram and the entire exhibition was on display. Invisible Cities. “Here we are,” he says.
Ms Sarabhai recalls dancing in Hyderabad from the “very beginning” of her career; “It must have been in ’79 or ’80 when the city was ‘different.'” It reflects on how one of the cities explored in the performance is a “city of memories” and raises questions about what actually constitutes a memory and what makes Hyderabad now “Hyderabad.”
“We live in a part of Hyderabad that has little to do with Hyderabad,” he says, asking what the city center means to each of us. The production examines this through 12 cities; their names and main ideas are taken from Calvino, but “nothing else”. He adds that everything beyond that is imagined by the director: “He who wrote it, also illuminated it.”
He talks about the challenges and possibilities of telling a story without speaking: “How do you tell the story of destruction without a word, through dance?”
Pointing out that he returned after a year and could no longer recognize the city, he raises the questions of whether this is “the city of your memories”, “the city of nostalgia” or “a city of your dreams”. Sometimes, he says, a sudden odor “gets stuck in your throat.” “That’s the kind of connotation that the show makes,” he explains.
Ms. Sarabhai describes how this avant-garde production received an unexpectedly strong response. “Meanwhile Elsewhere It was created and premiered at the Vikram Sarabhai Festival on December 28 last year. Then, by January 9, we were asked to play it again and again,” he says. At one demonstration, delegates from 30 or 40 countries were present at a major international conference, including UNESCO’s head of urban planning and Amsterdam’s chief urban planner. They watched the demonstration and “took our hands” and told him that everything they had talked about – the destruction of the earth and the seas, climate change, endless lectures and films – had been conveyed in 100 minutes of production.
On the national tour that followed, the emotional impact continued to surface in surprising ways. He recalls being deeply moved by the people who came to him, including designer Sabyasachi. “He grabbed me and said: ‘Mallika, I haven’t been able to cry for 20 years. And I cried throughout your show. Thank you. You’ve put me back in touch with my humanity.’ So something seems to be working,” he shares. According to him, such reactions show that something in the work breaks the distance created by modern life; It’s such a great distance that “we don’t even remember there was another time” except for those old enough to remember it.
When I ask how the performance plays with memories, he smiles and says: “You should come and watch.” What the production carries is the past, he explains, and an attempt to show “what evokes that feeling.” As an artist who has done most of the choreography, he continues to discover new elements in every performance. “This goes for us actors too,” he adds. The work is so multi-layered that “a different sentence, a different smell, a different image” touches a different part of the person depending on their mood, situation, and the current week.
In Ahmedabad, where they have now staged about 15 shows, some audiences have returned three or four times. “They say they find a different layer every time,” he says.
It was published – 20 November 2025 01:17 IST
