Manola Gayatri Kumarswamy

Manola Gayatri Kumarswamy works on ecological relationality through performance as research, digital imagery, writing, pedagogy, psychodynamics, embodied practice and multi-disciplinary collaboration. She positions her work as decolonial gesturing that works with knowledge, performance and ecological sustainability from a trauma healing based practice.

Her work Excess has been showcased at the Gati Emerging Choreographer’s (India Habitat Centre, New Delhi) Virtual Borders Festival.  Sunchasers and Veil of Kashmir developed on the Art Karavan International (2010) at Sarai Centre, School of Arts an Aesthetics and at the Virtual Borders Festival. Her performance poetry has been amongst the top 5 in Johannesburg’s Word N Sound Stage, and her two solo works Darshan-UVhona and JourneyWomxn have been performed at IFTR Belgrade, Kamani Auditorium (New Delhi), Imbizo Arts Festival Shoonya (Bangalore) and Breytanbach Theatre (Pretoria).

Her Performance As Research Projects have included art work Veil of Kashmir in the Gendered Citizenship: manifestations and performance Project,  oko:the spirit of empty wells and JourneyWomxn: Akka on the Hill included in Routledge’s Forest and Fences.  She co-edited Contemporary Theatre Review’s Special Double Issue What’s Queer About Queer Performance Now (2024) and edited CTR online Interventions issue Queer Practice (2024). She teaches at the Dept. of Communication Studies at Mount Carmel College, Bangalore and is extended faculty for Drama For Life, Wits School of Arts, University of Witwatersrand, Johannesburg. Her interest in seaweed began after encountering kelp during an ocean residency (Arts Research Africa Grant 2020); and this, alongside her BodyDreaming training, has re-oriented how she conceptualises relationality.