An artistic response to the struggles of being gay in this country
“What I do in my bedroom has to be your business, my sophisticated friends. For you have made my sexuality a public matter even before I was born. Have you heard about Section 377 of the Indian Penal Code? It is our ridiculously archaic law against ‘unnatural’ offences,” Nishit Saran had written in the article titled “Why my bedroom habits are your business”, to not only talk about the colonial law which violates constitutional rights to life, liberty and prevention of discrimination on the basis of one’s sexual identity, but also to talk about the lives of millions of people and their constant collective fear and pain that have been silenced and made invisible in the face of the Indian legal system.
Delhi-based Gati Dance Forum’s managing director Mandeep Raikhy’s latest piece Queen Size is an artistic response to Saran, a queer rights activist and a trailblazing filmmaker known for his powerful documentary Summer in My Veins that traces his personal struggle with family and his homosexual identity.
Played out on a charpai, Queen Size is a detailed study of the intimacy between two men. The duo, Lalit Khatana and Parinay Mehra, translate the pattern of their close encounter — carnal, mechanical and emotional — into a texture that surfaces the Gujral house in Jor Bagh. 24, Jor Bagh, a private home where the choreographic exploration takes place is an attempt to pose questions around spectatorship, privacy and dissent.
The piece is premised on the notion of “looking” — looking, that sometimes verges on voyeurism, sometimes on gazing, at other times on censorship or even defiance. As the dancers keep looking only at each other fixedly while getting intimate — sometimes as they stand motionlessly and stare at the other, or while playing around the idea of proximity as they tease each other from under the charpai, or as they touch, undress, make love and change sexual positions — choreographer Raikhy leaves open-ended the almost bedroom-like space of Jorbagh for spectators to either choose to gaze through the window from outside or explore the contested spaces of the private and the public that revolves around queer lives by choosing to either enter and sit through the piece, change positions of viewing in between the piece or leave at any point.
In fact, while deciding to make his bedroom business, perhaps Raikhy somewhere questions the privilege of “looking”. The onlooker, spoilt for myriad roles to choose from, may feel empowered, but as the subjects hardly look back in reciprocity, it may perhaps be seen as an ultimate voiding of the possibility of power. As a corollary, it should also be noted that this voluntary decision of two adults to sleep with each other, to do what they want to do in their private space, an act of rebellion against the existing law, gets enhanced by the theatrical/public space that surrounds it — how, where and why it is viewed or looked upon.
Japanese sound designer Yashuhiro Morinaga has used sounds that add soul to the choreographed piece. Of particular mention is the lighting, the way the dim yellow lights are made to fade fast as the intimacy between the dancers gains momentum, adding more nuance to the narrative.
— Srija Naskar