Something about me
I am a multidisciplinary performance maker of Indian origin. My work asks: what makes relations possible?
I create spaces where bodies—human, material, and more-than-human—meet through intuition, care, and attentiveness. My practice is about reimagining the mundane to explore how we experience our own bodies through emotion, gesture, and material presence. I work with different elements—such as environments, setups, and ways of meeting—as extensions of the body, forms that expand how we sense, feel, and receive questions through presence rather than resolution.
Rooted in collective sensibilities, my works grow through collaboration and cross-pollination of methods, cultivating fields of curiosity and shared awareness. I am drawn to the hidden figures within our societies, their untold stories, and the subtle connections we share through proximity, memory, and care. Coming from a multi-biographical context of given and chosen realities, I explore the adaptable nature of performative conditions—how the body attunes to shifting situations and environments.
Often situated outside traditional theatres, my works emerge from everyday geographies and fleeting encounters. Through synesthetic connections between body, sound, material, and atmosphere, I develop movement vocabularies that weave relations—between people, between relation itself, and the environments that hold them.
The World Needs More Grandmothers explores the voices of grandmothers in Belmonte — their gestures, memories, and everyday wisdom. During my residency at Casa Belmondo, organised by Rivoluzione delle Seppie, I have been visiting grandmothers in their homes, spending time with them, listening, and inviting them to inscribe their stories, symbols, and thoughts directly onto a saree passed down from my mother.
The saree becomes a hand-written archive in their mother tongue — a fabric layered with encounters, care, and lived experience. Each mark carries presence: a trace of what is often unseen yet deeply felt. It will soon inhabit Casa Belmondo as a living, tactile space of memory — a quiet landscape where stories of care and inheritance are made visible, held, and shared.
This work continues my artistic search for ways to encounter bodies and voices often placed at the edges of society — the elders, the hidden figures, the sick bodies — and to create spaces of listening where collective memory can take shape through touch, language, and time spent together.
At the heart of the project is an invitation — for others to join this growing archive. During the sharing at Casa Belmondo, I invite visitors to contribute their own memories, stories, or lessons received from their grandmothers. In the language of their heart — their mother tongue — each person can inscribe a few words or a thought onto the fabric. These contributions extend the archive beyond Belmonte, connecting voices across generations through gestures of remembrance and care.
Concept & Realisation: Keerthi Basavarajaiah
Part of: W.O.M. (Word of Mouth) Collective
Residency: Casa Belmondo, organised by Rivoluzione delle Seppie
Location: Belmonte Calabro, Italy
Coordination & Translation: Melissa Bii
Documentation: Fraiborz Karimi
With thanks to: Rivoluzione delle Seppie, the community of Belmonte, and all the grandmothers who shared their stories.
The World Needs More Grandmother
PHANTOM TRAVELS
PHANTOM TRAVELS emerged from thinking with the movement of caregivers and receivers within the differently abled-challenged community. During times of limited movements and encounters, we looked for alternative ways to come together. PHANTOM TRAVELS is a one on one personalized performance, a proposal to travel with a roles of care receiver and giver. Stemming from experiences of working as a caregiver, this work looks into the possibilities of creating movement within care and limitations of self. To meet in our vulnerabilities in the theatre of one’s own space of comfort, as we meet eachother for a mutual encounter. We fuel and play through movement, imagination, initiation(gestures,invites) and engagement to generate narratives and a flow of exchange within the play of conditions. With a portable stage: a mini trampoline(Amsterdam series) and Sound/music(Den Bosch series), this individualised performance lasts between 15-25 minutes. Curated for the sensibilities of differently abled people within our communities. https://www.festivalboulevard.nl/en/program/id-7053/phantom-travels/
Concept and direction: Jija Sohn and Keerthi Basavarajaiah
Performed by :Eva Van Pelt, Keerthi Basavarajaiah and Koen Wijnen
Supported-funded by Fonds Podium Kunst, Boulevard Festival, Den Bosch, and Danse Brabant
‘ART ON DELIVERY’ is a series of short(one on one) encounters brought to the receiver with an art object. During the time of lockdown, this proposition looked at exploring the structure of delivery to facilitate physical encounters at a distance. What happens when the moment of delivery is artful? When it is not a mere transaction but a staying with the moment? With AOD, these moments of delivery become something out of the ordinary, encounters that created a wonder, laughter, thinking with….. in between the mundane rhythms. The series moved with the emergent narratives and the needs we relayed in the realm of uncertainties. Rewarding and yet challenging in its tonalities, the work carried gestures of resonance. We met them in from of their doors,parks, docks, hallways, back gradens, studios,working spaces. It was requested as a gift, with a joy of encountering strangeness. Also from a strong call for a encounter which was not throug virtual mediums. The moment of delivery lasted up to 15-20 minutes, curated and catered to the sensibilities of the person delivered to.
Concept and direction: Keerthi Basavarajaiah
Performed by: Marina Orlova.
Thinking with:Halbe Kuipers
Supported-funded Balcony scenes, Fonds Podium Kunst
Art on Delivery
LURING WHISPERS
LURING WHISPERS:hauntingly, a body can be affected without being physically touched by an other, with spooky action at a distance there is no simple location of objects as separated out in space. Traces of bodies generating more bodies in becoming. A space where the mode of performance makes felt what is moving between acts. In-between moments composing a series of and and and….. Questioning the common assumption of human agency, which is always visually dominant, this work looks at generative spaces where disappearing bodies foreground the experience at play in the interstices of perception. Weaving materials together, what comes to the foreground in the most common things are minor gestures in almost ungraspable qualities, almost surreal. Multiplicities of bodies in their manner of occurrence. Things – or thingies – come alive in a subtle dance that always exceeds its parts. From tiny sounds – crackle, sizzle, sputters – to the body gestures that more often than not go unseen, the work tends to what goes unseen. Perhaps more than a performance, the work stages encounters: between bodies, between things, between time
Concept, Choreography: Keerthi Basavarajaiah.
Concept, choreography and design: Keerthi Basavarajaiah Performed by : Marina Orlova, Keerthi Basavarajaiah
Advise : Erin Manning, Antonia Steffens
Technical support : Fritz van Driel, Dave Krooshof
Special Thanks : Halbe Kuipers, Abhishek Thappar, Lucia Fernandez Santoro
‘LURES’ is a hybrid installation weaving through the forms of movement, puppetry, choreographic objects, and live electronics.Moving between the notions of touch, textures, presence, expressed through the materiality of the objects flourishing through the musicality. With the accentuated need to connect within the imposed limitations of today’s world, this installation offers a way of distance participation. Creating a rhythmic play of sensorial qualities with visuals and sounds, things come alive in a dance that exceeds its parts. Composition-The Installation will be curated to the design and the acoustics of the gallery space. How?- A series of 5 composed objects( PFA) are suspended in space with strings through pulleys. Each hanging object will be interacting with an object on the floor, in order to create a 3rd affect. The installation is designed in a manner that every movement of the string through the pulley will produce pre-curated electronic sound. These objects are activated from the other end of the string from a distance by members of the audience. Thus there is a relay of every movement through sounds resonating and influencing one – another. This installation is a iteration of my earlier work “Luring whispers” which was a 35 minutes theatre piece, created in July 2020
Concept and direction: Keerthi Basavarajaiah
Music (live electronics): Tatiana Rosa
Thinking with : Halbe Kuipers
http://ltk4.de/termine.html
LURES
Tape-estry
Tape-estry – A music instrument at a performance. This project started as a collaboration with Verena Barie a graduate from the electronic composition department at the Conservatorium. Our intentions for this piece is for the audience to experience a the performance which is correlating with the construction and deconstruction of a predefined sonic instrument. The theatricality of the piece is the aspect of producing different sonic elements within a given space( constructed instrument, walls, speakers, wires, body). These sounds are produced through how the performers choose to exist in the space. Considering the entire space is tuned to pick up sound waves. The sensitivity of the performers needs to be adaptive to the conditions that vary with the intensity, frequency, how, and where one is interacting with the instrument. With the variability of the instrument. The performance is primarily the presentation of the de-constructed image of an instrument which is built with an unconventional material. Every material which part of the instrument projects certain roles and theatricality. Every gesture and every movement in the space is a result of resonating sounds. The use of the performing body in the piece is an integral method of existing, playing(musical) and creating various sound-scapes. This intention with this piece is to create/facilitate the performance to be experienced through Synesthesia (triggering different senses through the memories of sound in the body’s). This would be achieved using sound (singular and in combination) as a medium to relay actions, images, and associations relative to each member of the audience. This use of sonology and emotion is in relation to the history of the Indian scale system which is designed by the emotions that are triggered by the combination of certain notes. My personal need and curiosity on how performance can be experienced in different ways for an audience who come from diverse artistic sensitivities. Sounds/music being such an integral part of any performances, I was curious to bring the source of these sounds into a performing space. My interest grew when research started with the study of the construction of different instruments from classical to new electronic instruments. The instrument in its process had to exist as enormous as wrapping the space with its presence. Becoming the body of the body. Staying with the questions on how one can revisit the movement- the affect of sound in performance. Sound – hearing – listening is one of the most accessed and effective forms of medium one chooses to engage with. How will this sound be influenced when the source of sound is made visible. How many characters can we give to the source from which the sound is created? A constant state of hearing and listening to the feedback of ones performing. it is a performance-based piece that is dedicated to playing/composing different soundtracks in the alive-space. space becomes like a magic sonic box revealing itself through different shapes, sounds, in silence, voice, and through the moving bodies.
Choreography and concept development- Keerthi Basavarajaiah and Verena Barie
PAUSING A RESONANCE explores the notion of service in relation to the desired image and an attempt at capturing it. In between people that perform different acts, that identify them as either the one who can or the one who can be seen.”The best things ever built were only built on paper. No truly great building has been built anywhere in the world, that has not been turned into a ruin, one way or another.” (Josef Ponten, “The Babylonian Tower”)When you produce yourself, what are the mechanics you apply to make yourself visible to me? See yourself as an image, how would you like to materialize your own gaze? Your eyes would become just the idea of your eyes projected into form.Where we appear to end physically we construct appearance in a shifting field made out of memories, visions, desires, objectification, projections. We play in that field, we manifest, we escape, we trick, we hide, we reveal.
choreography,development & performance: Antonia Steffens, Keerthi Basavarajaiah
drawings: Antonia Steffens
advisor: Michele Rizzo
PAUSING A RESONANCE
