Aurélien Bory / Shantala Shivalingappa

I met Shantala Shivalingappa in 2008, backstage at a theatre in Dusseldorf, where she was a guest of Pina Bausch. It was here that everything came together in a hugely powerful way. aSH is the final opus in the trilogy of portraits of women, ten years after it began in 2008 with Questcequetudeviens?, followed by Plexus in 2012. In this trilogy, I take as a starting point not space – which is my usual theme in theatre –, but a woman, a person with a story; a living being who unfolds through dance. Shiva, god of dance, dwells in Shantala Shivalingappa. According to the texts, Shiva has over one thousand names. He is a god of creation and destruction. Ash is not merely the solid residue of perfect combustion: it is here a process. It is part of a cycle of death and birth, which begins from nothing, the start of any form in the theatre, and leans towards an ephemeral form before disappearing. Shantala’s dance resembles a kolam, a flour drawing made on the ground in the morning and destroyed by the wind during the day and made again the following day. Circles, points, symmetries, spirals, fractals… her dance seems to be a representation of the very structure of the world. For aSH, a title made up of the first and last initials of her name, I would like the entire space to have a rhythm. I would like the space to express itself first as a vibration, which is then picked up, transformed and prolonged infinitely by the percussionist Loïc Schild. Shantala’s dance is created based on her journey from India to Europe, from Kuchipudi to Pina Bausch, from Shiva to Dionysus, god of theatre, who some say are born of the same god. Shantala is always travelling between Madras, her birthplace, and Paris, where she lives. Her dance is a perpetual pendulum, much like our meeting: somewhere between the Hindu mystique and quantum physics. – Aurélien Bory


Aurélien Bory was born in 1972 in Colmar, France. Aurélien attended physics courses and these studies took him to work in the field of architectural acoustics. The artist Mladen Materic, whom he met at Théâtre Garonne, introduced him to the acting craft. In 2000, he founded Compagnie 111, in Toulouse. He develops a physical theatre, singular and hybrid, a crossbreeding of different disciplines, converging circus, dance, visual art, and music. Intrigued by the question of space, his works reflect a peculiar aesthetic, are driven by sciences, and strongly rely on the scenography. His repertoire of thirteen creations is played in prestigious theatres in France and overseas. 

Shantala Shivalingappa shares her time between Madras, where she was born, and Paris, where she grew up. She was trained in classical Indian dance at a tender age by her mother, dancer Savitry Nair, and then by her master Vempati Chinna Satyam in the Kuchipudi style. Since the age of 13, she had the privilege of working with some of the greatest artists of our times: Maurice Béjart, Peter Brook, Bartabas, Pina Bausch and Amagatsu. Today, internationally acclaimed as a rare dancer, she is an ambassador for Kuchipudi, sharing her passion for this style across the globe. She was the first to earn a Bessie Award (2013) for a South Asian style, for her solo Shiva Ganga. Passionate about human encounters and the artistic journey they trigger, she also revels in collaborating with various artists in the exploration of dance, music and theatre.