Photo Project: Butoh-Natyam by Manab Das | Butoh at Qutub Shahi Tombs

There are certain works that feel less like projects and more like thresholds. Butohnatyam was one such threshold for me — a space where my training, my drag, my politics, and my spiritual curiosities collided. While I was learning Butoh with Adam Kuan, I began to understand that Butoh is not merely a dance form from Japan; it is a philosophy of dismantling. Born in post-war resistance, Butoh rejects decorative beauty and instead invites the body to confront trauma, decay, absurdity, and silence. It asks the performer to move from the subconscious, to allow discomfort, to let the grotesque breathe. As someone who has always used drag as a site of protest and reclamation, I found myself deeply aligned with this vocabulary. Drag destabilizes gender; Butoh destabilizes the body. Both refuse obedience.

The idea of merging Butoh with Bharatanatyam did not come from a place of aesthetic experimentation alone — it came from tension. Bharatanatyam is codified, disciplined, devotional, and mathematically structured. Every mudra has grammar. Every glance has direction. Butoh, on the other hand, resists grammar. It dissolves structure. It allows collapse. I began asking myself: what happens when precision meets rupture? When devotion trembles? When a mudra loses certainty? That inquiry slowly evolved into what I call Butohnatyam — not a fusion, but a friction.

On a quiet Sunday evening, photographer Manab Das and I walked into the haunting expanse of the Qutb Shahi Tombs. The space carries the weight of empire, mortality, and layered histories. It is a Muslim necropolis where architecture stands as memory. I was not interested in using the tombs as a backdrop; I wanted them to be collaborators. The stillness of that space, the echo of footsteps, the texture of stone against twilight — everything felt like it was watching. Butoh frequently engages with death, not theatrically but existentially. Performing in a graveyard intensified that dialogue. I was not enacting death; I was standing amidst it.

Visually, I embodied the idea of the Aghori — not as costume-play, but as philosophy. The Aghori rejects binaries of pure and impure, sacred and profane. That transgression mirrors both Butoh’s rebellion and my lived experience in drag. I wore red and black — red for blood, rage, ritual, and Shakti; black for void, protest, and annihilation. My makeup drew inspiration from Kerala’s ritual performance traditions like Theyyam — bold, circular, confrontational — yet I internalized it through Butoh’s slow, almost meditative intensity. The face was fierce, but the movement was restrained. The body carried ash-like stillness even when draped in dramatic color.

As I moved, Bharatanatyam mudras would begin with clarity but slowly dissolve into tremors. The spine that should remain erect softened and curved. My gaze shifted from devotional precision to vacant introspection. There were moments when I stood completely still, allowing the wind and the silence to perform through me. In those pauses, I felt stripped of performance ego. I felt porous — as if history, architecture, and memory were moving inside my body.

Manab Das captured these moments not as fashion imagery but as emotional landscapes. The sandstone domes rising behind my red silhouette created a tension that felt timeless. The photographs hold contradiction: ritual and rebellion, stillness and rupture, masculinity and fluidity, devotion and defiance. His lens did not beautify the body; it allowed its distortion to remain intact. That honesty was crucial.

Butohnatyam, for me, is not about blending cultures superficially. It is about interrogating form. It is about asking whether tradition can survive discomfort and whether protest can find structure. It is about allowing the drag body — already politicized — to enter a deeper, almost spiritual confrontation with mortality and memory. As a bisexual father, as a drag artist negotiating visibility in India, my body has always existed in contested spaces. At the Qutb Shahi Tombs, that contested body stood quietly, wrapped in red and black, negotiating with centuries.

This work reminded me that sometimes art is not about performing louder. Sometimes it is about listening — to stone, to silence, to the tremor inside your own spine. Butohnatyam was my attempt to let the body unlearn obedience and rediscover itself in ash, architecture, and afterlife.