Māya-Leela: Stories, illusion, and the worlds we long for (2026)

Performed with live music      
Choreography: Surupa Sen
Lighting Design: Lynne Fernandez
Featuring: Nrityagram dancers & musicians

Māya-Leela is a contemporary dance work rooted in Odissi, one of India’s classical dance forms, that explores storytelling as a way of making sense of the world. The performance reflects on how we create narratives - personal, cultural, and imagined - and how these narratives shape our experience of reality. Drawing on the ideas of illusion (Māya) and play (Leela), the performance views existence as fluid, layered, and constantly unfolding.

Created by Surupa Sen and performed by the Nrityagram Dance Ensemble, the work moves between intimate human experiences - love, memory, longing, desire - and larger reflections on creation and existence. These “small” and “large” stories overlap, echoing the way private lives are shaped by broader cultural frameworks.

Performed to original live music, Māya-Leela offers classical form as a living, evolving practice - one that resonates with contemporary questions of perception, authorship, and the stories we choose to inhabit.

Through the sculptural lines, rhythmic intricacy, and expressive depth of Odissi, the work gives form to these ideas - allowing movement, sound, and silence to carry what words cannot fully hold. The dance does not seek to resolve the paradox of Māya and Leela, but to dwell within it: to honor the beauty of illusion, the seriousness of play, and the profound humanity of storytelling itself. Māya-Leela invites the audience into this shared space - where myth and memory blur, where the divine and the everyday meet, and where, for a moment, we recognise ourselves as both the makers of stories and the stories being told.

Running Time: Approx. 115 minutes (includes a 20 minute intermission)
Touring Party: 8 dancers, 4-5 musicians, 1 admin/tech