Inspired by the Gujarati folk dance form Garba, Garbh brings traditional and contemporary performance together in an outdoor celebration of community, remembrance and the cycles of life.
A circle can hold a lot. It can be a gathering place, a ritual, a symbol of continuity and a reminder that beginnings and endings are rarely as separate as we imagine. For the creators of Garbh, the circle is all of these things. Inspired by the Gujarati folk dance form Garba, Garbh is an outdoor, in the round work exploring community, remembrance, lineage, love, healing and the cycles of life. Swirling movement and live rhythm unfold across an evocative landscape of sand, with professional dancers sharing the space with members of the local community. At its heart is a question about inheritance: what do we receive from the people who came before us, and what do we do with it? Garba is traditionally a communal form, practiced through celebration, prayer and ritual and learned as much through participation as formal instruction. For the creators of Garbh, that made it a natural starting point for a work about lineage. “Garba and Garbh, the womb, the word means the womb,” says Shyam. The womb becomes a metaphor for origin and transformation, a place from which life emerges and a reminder that every generation comes from somewhere.
That idea is made physical through the work’s sandscape. The dancers emerge from the earth and return to it, bury and uncover one another, and shift, scatter and pour sand across a large circular floor. At the beginning, mounds of amber and ochre sand sit separately across a terracotta coloured surface. As the performance unfolds, the dancers gradually redistribute it until the landscape itself has transformed. Shyam describes this as the work’s “sandography.” The sand is not scenery but an active body within the choreography, becoming earth, memory, ritual, healer and witness. “We treated it as a body in the space rather than this kind of external force,” he says. The creators became increasingly interested in how the sand could embody the work’s ideas of Mother Earth, divine feminine energy, revival and rebirth, whether through pouring it over the body, shifting it with the feet or using it to bury and uncover the dancers. The work’s relationship with death also emerged from this process. Initially conceived around renewal and the vitality of life, Garbh was challenged by its dramaturg to consider what must come before renewal. “You can’t really have renewal without decay and death,” they were told. That insight became central to the piece, which approaches death through moments of burial and shrouding before moving towards emergence and rebirth. The treatment is deliberately tender, and that tenderness has resonated unexpectedly with audiences.
At one sharing, a woman who was frightened of sand told the artists that watching the dancers interact with it had changed her relationship to something she previously found frightening. Even seeing a body buried in the sand felt gentle enough to allow her to feel safe. “She was like, ‘It helped me heal from that a little bit,’” Shyam recalls.
The ideas of inheritance and matriarchal lineage are equally personal. Unlike the creators’ Indian classical dance training, which comes through formalised systems and codified movement vocabularies, their experience of Garba is rooted in family and community. Shyam learned the form through his mother, grandmother and aunt, and that lineage is now physically represented in Garbh by his mother, who performs the role of the matriarch. The role was originally intended for another performer, but when she was injured, Shyam’s mother learned it at short notice and stepped into the production. Her presence transformed the role. “She has this very strong presence and personality,” says Shyam. “But it’s really strength in love and a resilience in love.” That strength is fundamental to the work’s understanding of feminine energy. Rather than presenting the divine feminine simply through softness or delicacy, Garbh connects it to shakti, strength, resilience and power. For Shyam, watching his mother embody that lineage is intensely emotional. “I cry at the start of the piece because it’s so layered for me, seeing my mom in that role.” The image brings together mother and child, past and present, teacher and dancer, origin and continuation.
Although the creators are trained in Indian classical dance, they have been careful not to impose classical aesthetics onto Garba. The dancers come from a range of backgrounds, including Kathak, Bharatanatyam, contemporary dance and direct experience of Garba, and that mixture has produced different physical perspectives on the same root vocabulary. Their classical training has helped them structure the movement for professional performance, but the folk form itself remains at the centre. “The form itself hasn’t been manipulated in a classical sense,” one dancer explains. “Only the dancers in us just felt the movement.” Physically, Garba asks for something different from classical technique. “The postures are different, the release is different. The arms are held in, you flow with the movement. You let go and you surrender,” says Shyam. The creators became interested in where the energy of the form lives in the body, experimenting with sound and energy centres and examining the familiar Garba clap as a physical pathway. Where does the energy begin? How does it travel through the body? How does it radiate outward? These small physical intentions were layered alongside the larger narrative, allowing the work to remain rooted in Garba while expanding its choreographic possibilities.
The project began with a research and development period in 2023, funded by Without Walls through its Blueprint programme, with the ambition of bringing Garba into the UK’s outdoor dance landscape. The decision to work outdoors was deliberate. Garba already exists in public and outdoor settings in India, and its circular structure naturally allows an audience to gather around rather than sit in front of the dancers. The early R and D explored movement, sand and the physical world of the piece, but it also raised a more complex question: how do you take a folk form that belongs to a community and present a professional choreographic interpretation without disconnecting it from that community? That question eventually led to one of Garbh’s most distinctive features, its community cast. Rather than inviting community participants to perform briefly before disappearing into the background, the creators wanted them to be integral to the choreography. When the work tours, local participants can take part in workshops and then enter the performance itself. In the full version, they sit around the circular performance space dressed in ivory, representing ancestors connected to the dancers through earth, memory and lineage. They respond to the professional dancers, throw sand when the dancers throw sand and physically mirror moments of struggle and support. At points they enter the central space themselves. “We need to build a bridge between who we are and who the community is while watching the piece,” Shyam says. The community cast becomes more than an audience engagement device. It embodies the work’s central idea that culture is something held collectively.
That collective quality extends to the audience. Garba is participatory, and the creators wanted to retain the sense that anyone can enter the form. “Anyone can clap,” says Shyam. “And that’s literally the root of it.” Audiences have tapped along, sung along and responded physically to the dancers, blurring the boundary between watching and doing. They have also brought their own experiences to the work, sometimes revealing meanings the creators had not consciously considered. Audiences familiar with Garba can arrive with questions about how the form has been transformed, while those encountering it for the first time often respond to its broader themes. “They’re like, ‘It’s about life and death.’ And we’re like, yes. ‘It’s about community.’ And we’re like, yes. And then they’re like, ‘Oh, it’s about holding each other.’ And we’re like, yes.” One particularly powerful response came from a woman whose brother had died earlier that year. After a performance, she told Shyam that the work’s movement from death towards renewal had helped her think differently about her grief. Her mother, however, had found the experience too difficult and left before the end. Rather than seeing that as a failure, Shyam came away thinking differently about what it means to watch a performance. “We think that performances, the audience have to stay the whole time,” he says. “Actually, that interaction with the work is equally valid as someone who stayed till the end.”
Perhaps that is what makes Garbh ultimately feel less like a representation of tradition and more like an extension of it. The creators began with a desire to give Garba a new platform within the UK dance landscape, but the work has developed into something broader: an exploration of how culture survives by being embodied, shared and changed. The four and six dancer versions allow the work to travel to different settings, while the community cast changes according to each location. The people in the circle may change, but the underlying questions remain: what do we inherit, what do we lose, how do we hold one another and how do we begin again? “When the work becomes bigger than any person in the work, I think that’s when the work really transforms,” Shyam says. In Garbh, the dancers carry the form forward, the community surrounds it, the sand records what happens and the audience brings its own memories, griefs and hopes into the circle. Tradition, in this sense, is not something preserved unchanged. It is something alive. Something that moves.
Rubén Molina launched his La Salida, (The Exit) Flamenco presentation at the Théâtre Golovine on the 5th of July, for his month-long stay at the Avignon Festival.
Supported by his troupe of flamenco artists: dancers; Ana Brenes, Lori la Armenia, Paloma Lopéz, Araceli Molina, Caroline Pastor, and musician Marc Lopez; Molina embellished the Golovine stage with his interpretation of the ancient art of flamenco.
Molina plunges deep into the heart of flamenco, riding on the crest of the new wave practitioners of flamenco, cutting and analyzing the roots of this noble art, stretching back to its early origins in India, to bring forth fresh interpretations and meanings to the rhythms, songs, and traditions.
Molina is a virtuoso artist weaving a veil of enchantment to his creation, not only through dancing but also bringing forth the essential nature of flamenco at its base that of singing and music: exemplified by Ana Brenes, song, and Marc Lopez, consummate musician.
Sound creation Christine Diger, Creation florale Céline Argente, Lighting James Angot, Sound Octave Train, Costumes Maria Molina, aided by Assistant rehearsal Araceli Molina: all contribute to an entrancing moment of flamenco mania.
PKO