A show that serves a visual feast and food for thought

Artists performing at a play ‘Yele Oota’ by Vishwakiran Nambi at the 11th edition of Remembering Veenapani Festival 2025 held at Adishakti Laboratory for Theatre Art Research at Edyanchavady near Puducherry on Wednesday.
| Photo Credit: KUMAR SS

Even as it forged connections with the heartbeat of the agrarian lifecycle, “Yele Oota”, a production of Bengaluru-based Vishwakiran Nambi Dance Company, trained the spotlight on food insecurity and the access gap in basic nutrition, in a show that blended folk rhythms and contemporary dance movements at the 11th Remembering Veenapani Festival (RVF), hosted by Adishakti

“Yela Oota”, (which in Kannada stands for grand meal served on a plantain leaf), is both a feast for the eyes and food for thought, as it explores humanity’s primal relationship with food through a choreographic juxtaposition of the polarities of affluence and abundance (perhaps even wastage) on the one side and hunger and deprivation on the other.

The seven-piece ensemble of men and women artistes in traditional agrarian attire, alternates between movements of a balletic grace and bursts of raw energy; a syncretic amalgam of synchronous dance moves, rolls and slides across the stage floor.

The action progresses against the backdrop of Gopu Krishnan’s medley musical arrangement — folk melody, heavy bass guitar riffs, percussion, even a couple of sloka utterances centred on the philosophical tradition of regarding food as the ultimate truth.

The hybrid of styles is hardly surprising given that the training background of the artistes — Shrijani Rao, Kalpana Devaprasad, Thejas Kumar, Priyanka Saxena, Junafar and Dinesh Kumar — are as varied as the classical, contemporary and the aerialist genres.

As the troupe founder-choreographer Vishwakiran Nambi would say later, the project was originally inspired by the idea of a community feast that everyone partakes in together irrespective of caste or creed. The project, initiated in 2019 was interrupted by the COVID-19 pandemic, and the experiences of that difficult period also set off a change in course, thematically speaking, he adds.

“What we noticed during the pandemic was the conspicuous discrepancy in the distribution of food…such inequality of access to a basic need”.

He recalled how through community outreach and volunteer participation, a month’s supply of food was organised to about 700 families who were cut-off from basic rations. That experience would shape the production in its current version of exploring the inequalities in distribution of food and nourishment, especially when access to something basic turns into a privilege.

He was grateful that Adishakti insisted on the full one-hour performance, which is the version presented at festivals, though it is custom-edited to a 20-minute piece to suit popular demand. The original theatrical production has a runtime of over two-and-a-half hours, but the hour-long version is a good-enough duration to put the message across, he said.

The theatrical language, the movement grammar, was developed over many years from his extensive exposure to Indian folk-to-martial art dance traditions across regional landscapes.

As much as the geometry, it is more the factor of community engagement of folk dance forms — which are essentially rooted in social fantasy — that drives the movement performance of “Yela Ootu”.

The show, which uses cotton fluff, ladles, bamboo winnowers and banana leaves as props, seeks to portray the contrarian states of fraternal feasting and resource-rivalry, of abundance and hunger, and food as elemental right and inaccessible commodity.

“To narratively break it all down, we approach the whole piece as a sequence of story threads seen through the lens of a single grain of rice; where it wants to go and where it ends up”, Mr. Vishwakiran said.