Aditi Mangaldas: Forbidden review – a post-menopausal play for sexual pleasure

Sadler’s Wells, London
Leading Indian kathak performer Mangaldas explores her desire and confronts the double standards around men’s and women’s sexuality

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.

Forbidden is at Northern Stage, Newcastle, on 20 October

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from The Guardian https://ift.tt/iySRx3k