NAYIKA A DANCING GIRL

About the show

A chance remark by an old friend in Sydney takes a woman back to her teenage years: living alone, by the sea in Chennai. She’s preparing for her debut dance recital, her Arangetram. She’s falling in love too! But when young love begins to unravel, the memories flooding back take on a power of their own… This is a play about the profound ways indelible trauma shapes you, and the hope and defiance of taking back control. A breathtaking solo performance melding storytelling, live music and Bharatanatyam dance, made for the unique talents of Helpmann Award-winning Vaishnavi Suryaprakash (Counting and Cracking, Galileo, Sami in Paradise), Nayika is story as survival. It is dance as resistance. It is a new type of heroine: one we have yet to imagine. Vaishnavi is another treasure of the Belvoir stage, and this piece will enhance her reputation as a performer of skill and nuance, I’m sure. It’s astonishing how this work can be simultaneously rhapsodic and confronting. The dance is hypnotic, the music is spine-tingling, and the story is haunting and profound. – Eamon