Warring Bodies
Looking into the nature of Performance praxis in Bangalore
and its silent quirk against Text

R. Dhanya

To identify the aspirations and the outcome of the Bangalore performance enterprise, I would like to open a discourse on the phenomenon of performance art in the city. Is there really such a thing as ‘Bangalore performance art’? The actual physical city, its environs and its affect on the artists who live and work in it can be thought of as a deciding factor in how Performance is conjectured and performed.

In the recent years, certain sections of the general public in Bangalore have been getting glimpses of performances in public places. A woman walks with footwear worn on her head under a fly-over; another ply’s a rubber tyre on the road while blowing on a whistle on the M G road walk way; a man sets fire to his T-shirt to reveal a politically contested painting drawn on his chest (in this case Husain’s ‘Saraswati’) outside of the Alliance Francaise.