iṣ

iṣ (Desire)

This work began in my journal. While turning its pages, the word desire kept surfacing again and again, until I felt compelled to question it. What is desire, where does it come from, why does it persist? Around the same time, I met a street dancer by chance on a walk in Chandigarh. Our conversations led us into the studio and his background in hip-hop, mine in contemporary and through embodied inquiry, the idea began to take form.
The piece opens with us lying beneath a heap of clothes, symbols of material desire and overconsumption. To the shifting frequencies of John Cage, we ask each other borrowing from Krishnamurti’s recordings.

what is desire? From here, movement grows into a playful over-stimulation, mirroring fleeting mental cravings versus the deeper desires of the body. Soon, the very clothes that once offered pleasure encircle and trap us.

Desire then appears as imitation: the contagious urge to want what others have, to match our rhythm to theirs. Using house dance vocabulary, energy builds until control is lost, tipping into sexual desire which is explored with a cloth suspended from above. This conflict pushes us toward resolution: how do we recognise, articulate, and reorder our desires without being consumed by them?
The work closes by inviting the audience to join us in a small ritual: folding a line of cloth before leaving the auditorium.