Edges (Beams)

Image Credit: Marcel Zaes

Edges (Beams) is a multimedia performance that intends interpretations of the element of light through sound, movement, and video projection. The fully electronic soundtrack that Marcel Zaes contributes comprises high-pitched, sustained sine tones constructed out of algorithmic processes, that sound fragmented as if to suggest the inner disturbances and built-ups within a light beam, which at the surface appears utmost calm and continuous. The movement material that Meghna performs comes out of her research on imagining light as a form of suspension, fluctuation, and inter-weavings running in space. In that, she attempts to establish a relationship between the body and the light that is angular, rhythmic, and progressive in nature. The third element of the work, which is a video projection designed by Marcel, functions as an object of still light that gets installed as if to contribute an atmospheric coherence to the sound and the dancing body.

Live Sound Installation: Marcel Zaes

Light Installation: Marcel Zaes

Choreography and Performance: Meghna Bhardwaj

Supported by Prohelvetia: Swiss Arts Council, New Delhi; Premiered in 2018 at Sidharth

Hall, Goethe Institut- Max Mueller Bhawan, New Delhi.

Documentation: Marcel Zaes

Edges (Beginnings)

Image Credit: Marcel Zaes

Edges (Beginnings) is a solo dance work-in-progress (14 minutes) that wonders at the cracks, creaks, and ruptures that a body lives every day. In Japanese culture, there is a tradition of painting gold in the fractures of ceramic pots, based on the belief that when something suffers a damage, it becomes beautiful. Finish visual and sound artist, Jan Eerala, whose works express a magnificent perspective on cracks appearing in nature, has been a major source of inspiration for this piece. Eerala’s video works, that focus on environmental shifts/degradation in Nordic regions, capture the power with which nature accepts and celebrates fragility, defying wildly as much as gracefully, any sort of man-made systems of space and time. While the term edges on its own may suggest a sense of constraint or limitation for the moving body, an insertion of Eerala’s visual approach into the piece invites the moving body to find a sense of breath, life, and rhythm vis e vis the notion of edges.

Choreography and performance: Meghna Bhardwaj

Video installation: Jan Eerala, Marcel Zaes

Sound design: Marcel Zaes

Light design: Claude Parrat and Antoine Mozer

Produced and supported by Facets 2017, Attakkalari Centre for Movement Arts,

Bangalore.

Year and Place of Premiere: 2017; Rangashankara, Bangalore

Edges (Duet)

Image Credit: Kavi Dutt

Edges (Duet) is a dance work-in-progress (11 minutes) that emerges from a process of studying the number ‘2’, in that, how to find a physical, sensorial, and theatrical relationship between two dancing bodies when the word ‘edges’ is the only prompt available in space. The vocabulary is constructed from imagining spatial constraints in a flat and empty studio space, in which, the ‘other’ body too starts to function as a constraint, sometimes behaving in a mimetic fashion and other times actually putting in physical rigour to hurdle mobility in space.

Choreography: Meghna Bhardwaj

Performance: Sanchita Sharma, Meghna Bhardwaj

Space Credit: Gati Dance Forum, New Delhi

Year and Place of Premiere: 2016; PECDA (Prakriti Excellence in

Contemporary Dance Awards), Chennai.

Documentation: Manju Sharma