Synopsis

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This is the Male Washroom is a dance theatre exploration of gender, performance, masculinity and queerness through the lens of the male washroom. The piece binds the varied gendered personal experiences of the performer in the male washroom with collective experiences of gender and its performance. 

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How much of our identity as people is governed by performance?

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What relationship could Bharatanatyam as a form share with masculinity? Does it preserve it, nourish it, break it, play with it?

 

As grey as we acknowledge we are, what is this fascination for the ideal, for the absolute white, especially in the political reality that we live in today?

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What are these standards of masculinity and gender that one is drawn towards, again and again, in varied contexts?

What could vulnerable male friendships seem like? 

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Do spaces like the Male Washroom hold different realities for different people? What could tickle the washroom into being kinder? 

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Could friendships be spaces of collective solidarity, strength and love apart from genuine affection for each other? 

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‘This is the Male Washroom’ is an enquiry into these questions and more.

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Artist's Statement

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This is the Male Washroom has its roots in my own experience of the male washroom at different points of time: as a child in school, as a queer individual at malls, bus stops and public spaces, as a male dancer in auditoriums. These washrooms felt different, yet there was the constant thread of gender that one grappled with in these spaces. This piece was born out of introspections of these negotiations that happen between gender and the male washroom. The piece isn’t merely an expression of my experience in these washrooms. It draws from my lived experience but chooses to see reflections of similar relationships and negotiations between gender, performance and spaces across people. It is importantly an imagination of what can change these spaces and what comfort and joy could feel like if they governed these places constantly. This piece was born out of anger, fear, powerlessness, nervousness, the need for assertion and an innate sense of challenge that I felt and sometimes still feel as someone queer: as someone who does not necessarily fit into conventional notions of masculinity, in the male washroom, but goes on to speculate what safety, joy and comfort could mean in these very spaces and what it could feel like to access and claim the same, collectively. 

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About the artist

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Talin Subbaraya is an artist based in Bangalore. His artistic practice is based in movement, writing and theatre. His current practice of the arts is an attempt to find ways to tell stories from his personal lens, thus leading to experiments with the forms he practices. He is currently learning Bharatanatyam and exploring performance making with Priyanka Chandrasekhar at Nirali, a dance school and collective based in Bangalore. He was a part of G5A Foundation and Soho Theatre's collaborative script writing program, "Writer's Lab Mumbai" in 2021. During the same year, he was also a resident artist at Smarter Digital Realities, a residency curated by Padmini Ray Murray and produced by Sandbox Collective and Goethe Institut/Max Mueller Bhavan, Bangalore that led to the making of “An Alarippu”, a dance film created in collaboration with Priyanka Chandrasekhar and Armaan Mishra, that brought together his experiences of homosexuality across public spaces in Bangalore, and the alarippu, a piece from the Bharatanatyam repertoire. He was a part of the Unrehearsed Artist (Virtual) Residency curated by Nava Dance Theatre, San Francisco in 2022. He was also one of the recipients of the reFrame Genderealities Fellowship and the Prince Claus Seed Awards in 2023.

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Credits​

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Director | Priyanka Chandrashekher

Performer | Talin Subbaraya

Music Arrangement | Arvind Sridhar

Producer | Mrinalini Reddy

Videographer | Shiva

Trailer | Armaan Mishra​​