Bonjour India: S. Thala, union of French literature and Indian gestures, leaves audience mesmerized

The dance performance S. Thala An Indian Suite, left the viewers awestruck as it took place in Delhi near Lodhi Garden on 2nd April as part of Bonjour India 2022.

The creative process of S.Thala started in Kerala in December 2019 under the direction of Annette Leday, a French choreographer and dancer immersed in Indian and French theatrical and dance forms.

S.Thala is the name of an imaginary city invented by Marguerite Duras. It is strangely close to the Sanskrit term Sthala, which means location, space, room. For Duras, places are very important, charged with meanings, ghosts and questioning.

S.Thala focuses more on exploring the relationships and emotions of the “characters” and the emblematic atmospheres of Duras’ universe than on trying to reproduce or illustrate the complex narrative schemes of her texts.

With S. Thala, Annette Leday proposes a poetic visual approach of Duras prose through a choreographed interpretation of her organic writing, of the text L'Amour

L'Amour is a mysterious non-linear fragmented text that evokes reiterated, transformed memories extracted from the organic magma of the Indian Cycle. In L'Amour the characters have been dislodged from the original books and projected into new narrative regions.