Photo Project :HE SHE THEY by Shiva feat SAS , Ryan Martyr and Harsha Komet

In a time when gender is being fiercely questioned, contested, and celebrated, art continues to hold space for redefinition. He, She, They is a photo-performance project that sits at the intersection of dance, drag, and embodied storytelling. A collaboration between myself, dancer and performance artist, and two exceptional movement artists—Harsha Komat and Ryan Martyr—the project is a visceral exploration of gender beyond binaries.

As performers, the body is our first instrument and our final medium. It carries our histories, desires, contradictions, and truths. Dance, in its purest form, has never been about conformity. It flows, ungoverned by social architecture, allowing the body to speak in its own dialect. In He, She, They, we took this natural language of movement and layered it with the transformative power of drag to challenge normative expectations around identity and representation.

This was not a mere photoshoot. It was a gentle disruption.

Photographed by Shiva in the rugged openness of Rockcastle, the project used the landscape not just as a backdrop but as a metaphor. Nature, unfiltered and ever-changing, became our collaborator. The visual language was intentional: we used blue and pink not to reinforce stereotypical ideas of gender but to subvert them. These historically gendered colours were blended, transposed, and redistributed across bodies—reminding us that gender, like colour, exists on a spectrum. These hues no longer symbolised “boy” or “girl” but became part of a broader, more inclusive visual vocabulary.

All three of us wore saris—arguably one of the most complex and gendered garments in South Asian culture—but we each wore them differently. There was no single performance of femininity or masculinity; instead, there was fluidity. Grace. Tension. Release. In some frames, we resembled each other. In others, we appeared like reflections split across timelines, carrying distinct embodiments of gender, movement, and stillness. The sari, in this context, became both shield and skin. It adorned us, but it also allowed us to dissolve—into one another and into the landscape.

Crucially, both Harsha and Ryan do not identify as queer. Yet, their willingness to enter the realm of drag—an art form rooted in queer resistance—allowed the project to become a shared ritual. As a drag artist, I’ve always believed in drag not just as performance but as pedagogy. It teaches us how to undo. It asks us to become, unbecome, and then become again. By involving non-queer dancers in this process, He, She, They extends drag’s reach. It turns the exclusive into the inclusive. It reminds us that queerness is not only an identity—it is also a lens, a method, and a possibility.

At the core of the project lies a meditation on flow—not just in the choreography of the body, but in the choreography of identity. Flow, by nature, resists containment. It slips past boundaries, holds contradictions, and remains in motion. This is how we approached gender in the shoot—not as a fixed state but as a living, breathing rhythm that changes with context, costume, and community.

In a world obsessed with classification, He, She, They offers something else: a pause. A place to witness bodies that do not demand to be understood, but ask to be felt. This is not a spectacle. It is an invitation—to rethink, to reimagine, and perhaps, to surrender.

Ultimately, He, She, They is about liberation. Not from gender, but through it. Through the act of dance. Through the craft of drag. Through the power of collaboration. It is about creating art that is not only seen but sensed—where bodies become archives, and every frame, a testimony.