About the Project
Amma is a solo dance work that delves into the complex, multifaceted experience of motherhood — not just as a nurturing role, but as a profound emotional and psychological journey. This project seeks to unravel the quiet, often invisible contradictions behind the idealised image of the “perfect mother” — selfless, tireless, emotionally available — and to examine how these societal expectations can deeply impact identity and mental wellbeing.
Through the expressive classical forms of Bharatanatyam and Mohiniyattam, I am exploring how the body holds memory, care, grief, and resistance. These traditional South Indian dance vocabularies offer both a structure and a freedom with which to embody the emotional terrain of motherhood, not as a static role, but as a shifting, often conflicted state of being.
During the Make a Start Residency
The Make a Start residency offered time and space for me to engage in embodied research. Generating movement material, testing ideas in the studio, and reflecting on the emotional architecture of the piece. My focus was on how to develop a physical language that communicates the internal contradictions of motherhood: devotion and depletion, love and loss of self, strength and silence.
This phase of the project was about laying the groundwork. Not just choreographically, but conceptually for a longer-term development that I hope will eventually result in a touring solo work.
I also explored opportunities for audience engagement and conversations around motherhood, identity, and care, particularly within South Asian and diasporic communities.