Pickle Factory Season 5: Using dance to create spaces for collective healing

Subscribe to enjoy similar stories. Each year, the Pickle Factory Dance Foundation—an artist-led not-for-profit in Kolkata— creates homes for dance in repurposed spaces. This annual event celebrates its fifth season this year.

Titled ‘Holding Space’, it is a call to action and “an invitation to revisit what we stand for through the spaces we imagine, birth and experience together," stated the curatorial note. These spaces are both symbolic and literal in terms of physical areas, realms of hope and faith, plural and inclusive spaces, and more. The edition, which has been held in three schedules between February and March, across cities culminates today at the Alipore Museum, Kolkata, with the performance, ‘Shaiva Koothu’, a work that pushes the boundaries of Koodiyattam using a Tamizh text.

According to Vikram Iyenger, a Kolkata-based choreographer, curator, arts researcher and founder-director of the Pickle Factory Dance Foundation, believes that the annual event transforms unusual venues into performance spaces. This year, the team has worked mainly in the Alipore Museum, and the venue area has included a cosy community hub with little nooks to read books from the library, draw, paint, have conversations and just relax. The overarching idea of ‘Holding Space’—through performances such as ‘Can You Read my Body’ by tanzbar_bremen about the presence and absence of different bodies in space touching upon the topic of belonging performed by dancers with and without disabilities—has been to create areas of collective nurture and healing.