Hyderabad: Mallika Sarabhai returned to Hyderabad this Friday, this time not just as a dancer but as a chronicler of cities, their transformations, ruptures, and the memories they leave behind.The renowned dancer performed in the city for an Indo-Italian collaborative production titled ‘Meanwhile, Elsewhere’, at the Shilpakala Vedika. The work draws its conceptual spine from Italo Calvino’s ‘Invisible Cities.’ Sarabhai calls it one of her “favourite books since she was 18,” and the production is helmed by Darpana’s artistic director, Yadavan Chandran.“I have been telling him for years how exciting and relevant this book is. He never got around to reading it. Then, out of the blue, at the beginning of the month, he walked into a bookshop and saw the book. That sparked a start for this production.”The performance explores 12 cities, their names and thematic cues borrowed from Calvino, but everything else is reimagined. Chandran has written, conceptualised, and lit the production, while the ensemble interprets these cities through movement, sound, and visual storytelling. One of the central ideas, Sarabhai explained, is a “city of memories,” which raises questions about how memories are formed and what it means to belong to a place that is constantly changing.“Hyderabad, as lovely as it gets, has always had a wonderfully diverse population,” she says. “But have you ever wondered what the city was like many years ago? Ask residents of the Old City, or imagine how your ancestors lived,” she adds. For her, returning to a rapidly changing metropolis also raises deeper questions. “When you come back after a year and no longer recognise the place, does it then become a city of your memories?” she asks.According to Sarabhai, ‘Meanwhile, Elsewhere’ engages not just with physical landscapes but with emotional and social ones too. The production touches on sensitive themes such as loneliness, mental health, poverty, and the quiet struggles embedded within urban life. These concerns, she says, are inseparable from the experience of living in, and remembering, a city.The performance also contemplates larger arcs of loss, reconstruction, and resilience, drawing parallels between imagined cities and real ones. “There is a disconnect between how people once saw the city and what it has become,” she remarks. “That disconnect shapes the kind of lives we now lead.” ‘Meanwhile, Elsewhere’ ultimately becomes an invitation to witness the instability of cities and the fragility of the meanings we attach to them, a fitting conversation for a performance premiering in a metropolis that has reinvented itself many times over.
