Dear Dead Doctor

Dear Dead Doctor is the final instalment of Epistolary Ancestries, Kiraṇ Kumār's long-term artistic research: a corpus of ten open letters, each addressed to an adopted ancestor. In this last letter, Kumār writes to his paternal grandfather, A. M. Śivarāman (1902–1976), on the blank pages at the end of the doctor's own diary.

The doctor was the first in the family to practise allopathic medicine, an identity that breaks with his grandson, a dancer. But perhaps this was not the first rupture: to study Western medicine, the doctor may have had to disinherit native Indic knowledge of the body-mind. What if his descendants were to re-inherit it, through an artistic-scientific engagement with yoga and tāntrik dance?

Over six hundred "lines" are performed across stage, page and screen: textual passages, solitary words, loops of dance, curvilinear drawings. They evoke many kinds of bodies, familial, archival, mythical, medical, ritual, sonorous and digital, made of breath, skin, paper, light, cloth, shadow, flute, flour and pixels. The lines are also composed as music: the whole show runs on an original score by Bnaya Halperin-Kaddari, drawn from South Indian musical idioms and played on the bansuri. This dialogue between present and absent bodies makes the theatre a space for conversations about the (dis)inheritance of body-knowledge and the (co)conception of dis/embodied futures.