DEAR DEAD DOCTOR
Essay-Performance (premier 2025)

The many blank pages at the end of a personal diary of my paternal grandfather, A.M. Śivarāman (1902-1976), call out to me to reach out to him for the first time. Upon these very pages, purposefully and playfully, over six hundred ‘lines’ are performed across surfaces of stage, page and screen. The lines are non-linear - some textual passages, some solitary words, some loops of dancing, some curvilinear drawings. These lines evoke many kinds of bodies - familial, archival, mythical, medical, metaphorical, ritual, temporal, visual, unusual, sonorous and digital. These bodies are made variously of breath, skin, paper, light, cloth, shadow, photo, flute, flour and pixels. This inter-generational dialogue between present and absent bodies offers up the theatre as a space for personal, collective and collaborative conversations about (dis)inheritance of body-knowledge and (co)conception of dis/embodied futures.