Preethi Athreya’s ‘Rubber Girl’ is a tribute to the cabaret

Experience Rubber Girl at G5A this weekend, a cabaret performance exploring dance, music, and rebellion in a unique setting.

Movement is any dance’s motor. But when it comes to cabaret, a theatrical form that also features music, song, recitation or drama, a dash of oomph is also a requisite. 

This weekend at the Black Box, a unique black-chair multi-functional space that seats around 165, G5A presents plenty of all that makes cabaret memorable in Rubber Girl by Preethi Athreya.

G5A produces and co-creates interdisciplinary and multidisciplinary work often seen as experimental, and Preethi has been part of its In Residence programme, a production series that creates space for practitioners to explore their craft and expression and refine their practice. The work, which is grounded in traditional and contemporary performance methods, is then hosted over a period. 

Preethi is a contemporary dancer based in Chennai who also trained in Bharatanatyam. After a post-graduate degree in Dance Studies from the Laban Dance Centre, London, she uses dance as an agent of change, constantly trying to free it from the strictures of more traditional dance practices. It is this blue-print that Preethi employs in Rubber Girl, a 57-minute performance where she looks at cabaret through different angles.

“Rubber Girl was the name given to Cuckoo Moray, an Anglo-Indian actress and cabaret dancer, who peppered many Hindi films of the 1940s and 1950s with her graceful moves,” says Pravin Kannanur, a Chennai-based multidisciplinary artiste overseeing the dramaturgy and technical direction of the performance.  

“But Cuckoo Moray is not the subject itself. The pretext is the idea of the cabaret. Preethi will explore this idea, what it was in pre-war Europe, Edith Piaf’s torch ballads (laments on unrequited love) and how the German playwright Bertolt Brecht drew from the cabaret, among others. Cabaret allowed for a certain challenging of the status quo, the governing aesthetic of the time. It also challenged the political. The work also references the cabaret sequences in Indian films. Cuckoo’s moniker of the ‘rubber girl’ looks at erasure on the one hand, and the polyvalence of this person on the other,” says Pravin. 

Rubber Girl has the structure of a travelogue, but it is not a history lesson or a linear production. “It juxtaposes the dance bars that were taken to court in India and how the cabaret has morphed into the discotheque space and other legitimate spaces. The idea is introduced through well-known songs such as ‘Mera naam chin chin chu’,” adds Pravin.