In collaboration with Het Nationale Ballet in Amsterdam; supported by the Netherlands Embassy in New Delhi; conceptualized by Hanne M. de Bruin & P. Rajagopal; Tamil script: P. Rajagopal

19th century Ballerina Marie Taglioni

Photo credit: National Portrait Gallery, London

Village audience watching an all-night Kattaikkuttu performance.

Photo credit: Kattaikkuttu Sangam

Jacob Haafner, Reize in eenen Palanquin, Amsterdam 1808.

Inmates of a relief camp during the famine 1876-1878 in Madras photographed by Willoughby Wallace Hooper.

Photo source: https://www.flickr.com/photos/elcaarchives/5632054529 | Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Devadasi, Indian dancer, image in Jacob Haafner’s Reize in eenen Palanquin 1808.

Indigo plant

Photo: Hanne M. de Bruin

Nikiya performs her solo in the second act of the Bolshoi Ballet’s “La Bayadère” | © photo by Damir Yusupov [https://www.artintercepts.org/2019/02/02/tradition-is-a-good-thing-but-bolshois-bayadere-is-out-of-touch/]

The playscript with the list of characters.

Drawing of the palanquin.

With thanks to Sue Rees.

Rehearsal 28 November 2023

Quitina, the British woman photographer

Reconstructing one of Willoughby Wallace Hooper’s photographs of the Great Madras Famine.

P. Sasikumar playing the mukavinai, the wind instrument that contributes to Kattaikkuttu’s characteristic sound scape.

Lady Quintina

Photo credit: Sue Rees