“Right now I am making a new piece called Folktale. We showed it at PECDA. But we are still going to develop it. And this piece is not on any political issue. It’s very simple. I am working with a prop, a lemon. And we’re trying to define the characteristics of lemon. A lemon has characteristics like people also have different characters. Even though I am Surjit, I am not one character. So in the same way, I took up the lemon to tell its characteristics in different ways. We tried to explore movement from each of these individual characteristics—how they affect our bodies when we touch, when we drink, when we absorb. I named it Folktale because we are telling a story about a lemon.

At the same time, I am also working with Takao Kawaguchi, a senior artist from Tokyo. I worked with him in 2015, in June. In November we are going to create a new piece. We don’t have a definite idea of how we will work. But we are trying to bring together our individual styles of working. It’s a duet. I have some rough ideas. We might do some installation work with props because Takao san is also very fond of props. And I have some ideas for sound, to make live music with the props. It will be an experimental way of working, not theoretical or thematic.

I think the prop is my environment, it is part of my life. Props move with you, they are not separate, they are living things for me. Every time you dance with a prop, you cannot cheat it—you have to be very aware of the prop. If you’re dancing with another human being and you make a mistake, the other dancer can react in a different way. But when you dance with a prop, if you make a mistake, it will show that you made a mistake. The prop is not going to have my back; I am the one carrying it.

In Nerves, most of the dancers were not trained. So to give them impulse, I gave them props. If you have an object in your hand, you can connect with it, and it can affect your whole body. Also, props in that piece were about reflecting life in Manipur. We used bamboo to describe where we come from. The boots are also common here because of the military control. There many associations with boots—it’s easy to feel many things. When the dancers saw the boots they got more intention, they got more into their bodies, rather than staying in their imaginations. For me the five dancers didn’t have fixed characters, just like the props. For me they are more symbolic.

In the audience, I am not targeting only intellectual people, but also ‘normal’ people. I am looking for an audience that can understand in a broad way. So using those props helped. But even though I used props in this piece, maybe next time I won’t use any.

In Manipur we don’t have many contemporary dancers; most are classical dancers. Their bodies are already classical—they are not organic. That’s why, in Nerves, I didn’t want to use people who had trained from childhood. Because I was looking for normal people to view the piece, it was better to use normal people in the dance, too. I was trying to see what their organic bodies can express, not by saying whether they are good dancers, but by how their moving shows their feelings and frustrations. I was also experimenting with these bodies because they are all of young people…some are hip hop dancers. But they had a hard time in this piece because they didn’t know what they were doing, what the piece was about, why they were moving. I wanted to experiment with how their characters changed as they explored these frustrations from inside their bodies.

But because we are from Manipur—we are born here, we are rooted here—this is in our bodies. I can’t deny it. When we do a movement, you see some bit of Manipur. Our living style, eating style, walking style is different. While I didn’t consciously use Thang Tha, it’s in our bodies, so some martial art came into the piece. Still, we didn’t use it any typical form. For me it was more like contact improvisation, especially when I created the torture sequence.

There’s always politics. Without politics there’d be nothing. Politics is everywhere. As I grow up, my mind changes. So when I create something, I always try to go into different ways of portraying myself. For instance, I don’t always work on a stage or proscenium. Sometimes I go outdoors. I want to work in a museum. There is always a political way.

Even love, relationships, are a kind of politics. What we talk about the government is not the only politics. Talking about my relationship, my family, is also a politics. So for me, everything is politics. It’s only about how you see the politics, and also different kinds of politics. It’s a genre…and I want to try a different genre of politics. Not only the military, not only the environmental, not only about a way of life. There’s also the politics of myself. Whatever comes to me as I grow up, whatever I face, I try to portray that in my work.”

As told to Poorna Swami