Urban Kali by Rakini Devi
Integrates dance, film and art to explore female identity
PLUS … WIN TICKETS! We have 2 double passes to giveaway to see this show on Saturday Sept 23. Send in your name and number to win@dancelife.com.au with title ‘Urban Kali’ to enter. Entries close Sept 15.
For two shows only, FORM Dance Projects and Riverside Theatres will present Urban Kali, a contemporary multidisciplinary performance that integrates dance, installation and film.
Born in Kolkata and based in Sydney, Urban Kali creator and performer, Rakini Devi, is renowned for her work that challenges notions of race, culture, social issues and new technologies.
Urban Kali explores themes of female ‘shame’, a concept prevalent throughout Indian society and many other cultures. Through performing iconography of the Hindu Goddess Kali, Devi creates a mythical persona to protest misogynist attitudes and atrocities.
Drawing on her Kolkata origins, classical Indian dance forms and visual arts practice, Devi showcases the female form as both ritual and artefact.
“My new work seeks to retain the beauty and mystery inherent in sacred Hindu culture, while also ‘un-picking’ traditional frameworks so as to relish, explore and stretch the tensions between sacred and secular intercultural performance,’ explains Devi. ‘Urban Kali celebrates the divine feminine in the context of contemporary intercultural dance by transforming Kali iconography to create new, mythic, contemporary paradigms of female identity.”
Urban Kali is the fourth dance production by Devi to focus on the goddess Kali following Kali Yuga, which was presented at Riverside Theatres in 2004. Devi’s solo performances have been presented in the US, Mexico, Canada, Japan, India, Europe, Indonesia and South Africa as well as nationally throughout Australia. Urban Kali is Devi’s doctoral presentation as part of her thesis at UOW titled Urban Kali: From Sacred Dance to Secular Performance.
