When does a performance end? Does it end when the audience leaves the auditorium? Maybe, it ends when the dancers leave the stage and disappear into the wings? Or when the dancers bow? Or when they stop dancing? But how do we know when they have stopped dancing?

At the first of the Platform Plus performances, on the second day of the Attakkalari India Biennial 2017, the dancers didn’t bow or disappear into the wings. The audience didn’t clap, or leave the auditorium, but instead waited and watched as the dancers and the crew started packing up the set. Rather awkwardly, the dancers and the choreographer, as they continued their post-show cleanup, watched the still-seated audience.

This was Mandeep Raikhy’s Queen-size—a choreographic response to Article 377 of the Indian Penal Code—where no line seemed to isolate the dance temporally. Time stretched, unbroken between performance and post-performance as the audience and performers lingered on in the space, gazing at each other. The proximity between the performers and the audience also allowed for the dancers to slightly brush the legs or shoulders of members of the crowd. These brief moments of contact between the artists and the spectators turned the whole venue into a makeshift bedroom, creating a purposeful intimacy.

Mandeep Raikhy’s Queen-size at the Attakkalari India Biennial 2017 Magali Couffon

But at the Attakkalari India Biennial, Queen-size didn’t seem to make the audience uncomfortable as previous reviews from other cities and interviews with the choreographer had suggested. It was the last minutes of unsurety—the audience wondering whether the piece had ended—that were most pregnant with the possibility of multiple meanings.

Initially, this sense of “untitled time” seemed to mock the voyeuristic nature of spectatorship. But the warm and thankful looks of the team as they packed up the space wiped away the guilt of being a voyeur. While an amorphous sense of time was confusing to experience, it expanded the spectatorial boundaries and durational thrust of the performance.

In retrospect, this sense of time gave room to wonder, to ask if the gazes exchanged there could be read as the “queer gaze”, which “questions any ‘natural’ appearance and the transformability of our identities, [and] contests that there can ever be a unified subject who is the spectator of the world”.^[1] We can extend this definition of the queer gaze to the nature of spectatorship that Queen-size invites us to reflect upon in its not doing anything, not dancing, not showing its choreography ended. Our position as spectators became vulnerable, transformable, and exchangeable with the performers. The queer gaze that the last moments of the performance successfully put forth unshackled the performance from its performativity by making it an act that we happened to encounter—we became watchers on the same ground as the performers. Any action by anybody, such as getting up and walking out became a part of the performance, and snatched the comfort of being a watcher who can leave the space once the dance ends.

^[1] Tim Wray, “The Queer Gaze,” Thesis, Wissenschaftliche Zeitschrift der Bauhaus-Universität Weimar, (2003) Heft 4, 70.