Prior to the creation of WARRIORS, In 2017 Australian Director Benjamin Knapton was commissioned by the Commonwealth Games Festival 2018 to create a new work with Mallakhamb artists from Mumbai. The result was Mallakhamb Mumbai, a 30-minute show featuring five of India’s best Mallakhamb artists accompanied by renowned Mumbai-based musician Donn Bhatt. This production was culturally significant, as Mallakhamb is traditionally performed as a 90-second sport or as a brief 3-5 minute demonstration in events or cabaret shows. Mallakhamb Mumbai marked the first time a full theatrical work was created that centered on Mallakhamb.
Since its world premiere, the show has been invited to perform at prestigious events such as the Sydney Festival, Melbourne’s Festival Du Luxe, the Royal Opera House Mumbai, the Sziget Festival in Hungary, and Escénica Ciudad de México. By August 2019, Mallakhamb Mumbai had reached an audience of 40,000 across four countries and multiple international festivals.
As part of Benjamin’s continued work in India, in 2019 he visited the birthplace of Kalaripayattu in Southern India and the leading proponent of Kalaripayattu in India, CVN Kalari, Trivandrum. The Kalari and Mallakhamb artists have long known of each other’s forms but never, to our knowledge, have the two combined in a theatrical show. The more we all spoke, the more we realised a theatrical meeting between the practices would be a timely journey worth taking. The work we did together revealed a physical language informed by ancient discipline as well as contemporary movement. The work resonates with a world in need of deep connections to its past in order to see its future: how can we create a work of art that speaks of discipline and practice and philosophical belief that genuinely infuses a contemporary way of living?
WARRIORS is the result of our work.