By Rani Moorthy
Directed by Iqbal Khan

Starring Shobna Gulati

World premiere presented in association with Contact, Manchester during December 2003

From temple dancers to Bollywood stars - the true-life story of an Indian woman who broke all the rules.

Southern India. A woman is preparing to dance in public. Preparing to cause a revolution. Taming the erotic and neutering the sensual, five thousands years of tradition will be flouted as Rukmini Devi makes the forbidden, respectable.

Spellbinding drama, dynamic Baratha Natyam dance and hypnotic Karnatic music expose artistic upheaval and social revolution in an India searching for a new identity. Where colonial codes clash with suppressed sensuality: sringara, the erotic longing for the Gods.

Dancing Within Walls tells the life story of controversial Indian dancer Rukmini Devi. From Empire into Independence, the play charts the life of Rukmini and her relationship to her repressed English husband George Arundale, and her guru Yellama.

Abandoning ballet and returning to her South Indian heritage, high caste Rukmini persuades Yellama, a devadasi and courtesan, to be her guru and teach her the fusion of eroticism and religion originally practised by devadasi (female temple dancers). Once revered, colonial morality and Hindu hostility had banned the dance, forcing devadasi to live as prostitutes and practice their art behind private walls.

Unable to connect with sringara, the core emotion of the dance, Rukmini breaks free from her guru's tradition. With the mind of a colonialist she takes the erotic art form and reinvents it as purely aesthetic Baratha Natyam dance. In front of an audience of 2,000, she becomes the first high caste woman to dance on a public stage. Replacing sensual curves with rigid lines, the dance is quickly respected and accepted among the elite.

Forming a school for arts (the Kalakshetra) and revolutionizing the position of female artists, Rukmini becomes one of India's most formidable women. However by stripping Baratha Natyam of sringara she invokes the anger of Yellama and 5,000 years of ancient tradition. Rani Moorthy argues that despite being one of India's leading radicals, championing independence, women's rights and animal welfare, as an artist Rukmini Devi was confined by her colonised mind, living and dying a Victorian.

Creating Dancing Within Walls

Working in Singapore, Rani Moorthy would hear Indian dancers refer to Rukmini as Athey (Aunty). Intrigued by the family familiarity conferred on a woman known to be as stern as Queen Victoria, Rani set out to explore her story, and in doing so uncovered one of 20th Century India's most fascinating women. A woman whose life encapsulates a nation's struggle with colonialism and cultural development.

Through a series of workshops Dancing Within Walls was developed at Manchester's Contact. The text was rewritten in response to the workshops and to comments made at sharings of the work. The process involved director/dramaturg Eileen Murphy, and actors and dancers Shobna Gulati, Thushani Weerasekeera, Gitanjali Kolanad, Chris Wilkinson, James Quinn and Sarah Parks.