We sat down for an exclusive interview with Himadri Madan, co-creator and performer of Mother | Maiden | Whore.
This show runs from 18th-30th August (not 24th-25th) at the Edinburgh Fringe – Tickets here
Originally, Maiden | Mother | Whore was a touchable exhibition: what was it like at the start and how and why did that change?
At the start, Maiden | Mother | Whore was less like a conventional dance performance and more like entering a room full of fragments. You could interact with objects, text, images, movement, research, and audience responses. The touchable exhibition format mattered because the work is about how ideas around womanhood are not abstract. They are felt in bodies, homes, institutions, healthcare systems, families, shame, care, desire and resistance.
We wanted audiences to move through the material before they watched us move. That meant they were not passive observers arriving at a finished meaning. They were already in relationship with the work and had the possibility to read, touch, respond, create memories and even disagree with the material shared with them. Their interactions became part of the research and the dramaturgy of the project.
Rather than saying the piece has changed, we would say it has become adaptable. We now have multiple formats, and each space asks something different of the work. In some contexts, the exhibition world can stay open and expansive; in others, the piece asks for a more concentrated performance structure, where the live body carries more of the emotional and political charge. So, the shift has not been from exhibition to “proper show”; it has been from one kind of intimacy to another. The Dance Base version holds the memory of the installation but asks what happens when that material is gathered into a theatre encounter.
In 2024, Maiden | Mother | Whore was performed in a series of community centres. How did that shape the piece and how has it changed in coming to Dance Base?
In 2024, the work did not simply move through “community spaces” in one format. What that period really gave us was the chance to test how Maiden | Mother | Whore behaves in different kinds of rooms, with different levels of technical support, different audience expectations, and different modes of engagement.
We premiered the work at the Roxy in a fuller technical version, which allowed us to explore the relationship between choreography, projection, sound, installation and theatrical atmosphere. We also presented a lower-tech version at Civic House, which tested the adaptability of the piece: what still holds when the work is stripped back, and what needs the frame of light, image or spatial design to land fully. Alongside this, the Being Human Festival and the symposium created other kinds of encounters, these were not only performances, but incorporated discussion, reflection spaces, public engagement and research exchange.
That was important because Maiden | Mother | Whore was developed through our artist fellowship with the Centre for Biomedicine, Self and Society. We were not only asking, “How does this work as a show?” We were also asking, “How does this work as a conversation? As an exhibition? As research? As a public engagement space? As something that audiences can enter from different positions?”
Coming to Dance Base changes the frame again. It gives the work a more focused theatrical context, with closer attention to choreography, design, projection and performance craft. But we do not want to lose what those earlier formats taught us: that the piece needs to stay responsive, porous and in conversation with the people in the room.
So, the Dance Base version is more shaped but not sealed. It gathers the learning from the full-tech performance, the low-tech version, the festival context and the symposium, and asks what happens when all that research is held inside a studio performance encounter.
How does the medium of dance shape the feminist ideas being explored?
A lot of Maiden | Mother | Whore sits with the roles that are placed onto women: purity, sacrifice, desirability, respectability, care, shame, obedience. These are not only ideas or arguments. They live in the body in the form of posture, gesture, breath, rhythm, distance, touch, refusal, exhaustion.
That is where dance becomes essential to the work. The body can hold contradiction without having to tidy it up. It can resist and comply at the same time. It can be disciplined and unruly, visible and hidden, powerful and tired. That feels closer to how gender is actually lived.
The work is rooted in transnational intersectional feminism, so we are not speaking about womanhood as if it is one shared, universal condition. We are asking how gender is shaped by race, caste, class, migration, sexuality, health, family, culture and policy, and how those forces move across borders, generations and intimate spaces.
The identities we carry as a creative team, and the identities carried by our collaborators, are part of the movement of the piece. They shape what we recognise, what we question, what we inherit, what we refuse, and what we make room for.
Because we work through South Asian classical-contemporary movement, we are also working with forms that carry their own histories of beauty, discipline, devotion, hierarchy, storytelling, caste, gender, community, migration. We are not interested in rejecting those traditions completely. We are interested in meeting them honestly: honouring what has shaped us, while questioning what they ask of the body and refusing the parts that have limited us.
How is audience participation encouraged and enabled?
Audience participation is at the core of the work, but not in the sense of putting people on the spot or asking them to perform vulnerability. From the beginning, we were interested in audiences as co-creators. We did not want our audience receiving a finished piece, we wanted that their own memories, refusals, discomforts and responses could enter the world of the work.
In the earlier exhibition version, audiences could move through the space, read, touch, write, respond or just observe. That range of choice was important. Participation did not have to look loud or visible. Someone writing a line on a postcard, pausing with an object, or choosing not to respond was still part of the encounter.
One example is the postcard library, one of the interactive exhibits that will also be a part of the performance at Dance Base. It has become a kind of living archive; it keeps growing through the responses gathered across different versions of the work. Those responses shape the work itself. They feed into one of our movement-based installation minor acts, so the audience’s voices become part of the choreographic material.
So for us, participation is also about consent and access. We think carefully about how people are invited in, whether instructions are clear, whether there are different ways to engage, and whether people can opt out without feeling watched or judged. The work asks for a relationship with the audience, but it should not demand one kind of response.
What role did the academic community have in the development of the piece?
The academic community has been part of the work from the beginning, especially through our collaboration with academics from the Centre for Biomedicine, Self and Society at the University of Edinburgh. The relationship was reciprocal beyond translating academic text into performance.
The project sits between artistic practice, feminist thought, health, social policy, reproductive justice, sexuality, and the relationship between self and society. Academic collaboration gave us space to think with those themes carefully, but the dance also challenged academic ways of knowing. Embodied knowledge, personal narrative, audience response and artistic process became part of the research.
That is important to us because Maiden | Mother | Whore is not just “about” women as a subject. It asks how knowledge about women’s lives gets produced, who gets to speak, whose experience is treated as evidence, and what gets lost when everything has to be made tidy or legible.
How does the combining of different artistic disciplines impact Maiden | Mother | Whore?
The performance needs more than one form because the subject itself is layered. Dance carries the body. Projection carries image, scale and acts almost as a mirror to the society. Text carries fragments of thought, memory and research. Installations and live encounters make space for audience’s physical relationship to the material.
Each discipline does something different, and together they stop the work becoming too singular and keep the complexity alive.
It also reflects how the work was made: through conversation, research, movement, feedback, community engagement and collaboration. The form is part of the politics of the piece. To quote one of our academic collaborators, Dr. Agomoni Ganguli-Mitra, sometimes in a creative process we can get bogged down by a single form and its technique, but some ideas need to be expressed in multiple forms for them to be accessible to a wide range of audiences. And that is the kind of space we like to create for Maiden | Mother | Whore where there can be more complex way of listening.