Kalaa Utsavam 2019: Preethi Athreya’s The Lost Wax Project

The Lost Wax Project believes that there is no space and time before movement. Photo courtesy: Facebook/Kalaa Utsavam - Indian Festival of Arts
The Lost Wax Project believes that there is no space and time before movement. Photo courtesy: Facebook/Kalaa Utsavam – Indian Festival of Arts

The Lost Wax Project is a unique production that focuses on movement. With the belief that there is no space and time before movement, The Lost Wax Project seeks to portray that the body does not move into space and time, rather it creates space and time.

Created by Chennai-based contemporary dancer and choreographer Preethi Athreya, The Lost Wax Project believes that our bodies are constantly in motion, reaching out towards something and creating different relationships with everything around us and thus seeking to reinvent themselves and become something else. 

The Lost Wax Project has been created by Chennai-based contemporary dancer and choreographer Preethi Athreya. Photo courtesy: Facebook/Preethi Athreya
The Lost Wax Project has been created by Chennai-based contemporary dancer and choreographer Preethi Athreya. Photo courtesy: Facebook/Preethi Athreya

Athreya was trained in Bharatanatyam under the Dhananjayans before attaining a postgraduate degree in Dance Studies from the Labon Centre, London. Since 1999, she has been working with eminent choreographer Padmini Chettur.

Bringing her composition The Lost Wax Project to Kalaa Utsavam this year, she seeks to explore the potentiality of space and its interrelations with the human body. The title of the piece is a metaphor from the sculpting process, in which wax moulds are used to cast metallic sculptures. When the sculpture takes its final shape, the wax that fills the mould is “lost”. 

The Lost Wax Project explores the potentiality of space and its interrelations with the human body. Photo courtesy: Facebook/Kalaa Utsavam - Indian Festival of Arts
The Lost Wax Project explores the potentiality of space and its interrelations with the human body. Photo courtesy: Facebook/Kalaa Utsavam – Indian Festival of Arts

“You are seeing something tangible, but [what] made it tangible is no longer there,” says Athreya, comparing the casting process to the function of the body in space. Presenting her work in a unique manner, Athreya crafts a circular stage around which the audience sits, inviting them into an intimate experience of the negative space between human bodies.

The Lost Wax Project is presented with the audience sitting around a circular stage. Photo courtesy: Facebook/Kalaa Utsavam - Indian Festival of Arts
The Lost Wax Project is presented with the audience sitting around a circular stage. Photo courtesy: Facebook/Kalaa Utsavam – Indian Festival of Arts

Click on the link to buy tickets.

Where: Esplanade Annexe Studio
When: 15 November, 2019 at 8.00 pm
               16 November, 2019 at 6.00 pm
Entry: SGD 20