Angarika Guha

This Foundation Project, implemented by IFA under Explorations will examine the neurological concept of the “phantom limb” and Feldenkrais method for movement and stillness, through storywriting and devised theatre, to meditate on the neurological condition of pain, explore the interactions between science and the body, myth and memory, touch and untouch, history and fiction. Angarika Guha is the Coordinator for this project. 

Angarika Guha is a Bangalore-based curator, researcher, and practitioner whose work engages with arts in public spaces, gender, sexuality, and urban development. Serving as Programmatic Director at the arts-media collective Maraa, she curates community interventions, performances, and site-specific exhibitions that centre narratives of exclusion and labour rights. Angarika has a Master’s degree in Sociology from the Delhi School of Economics and a Bachelor’s in English Literature from Lady Shri Ram College. Her cross-disciplinary practice spans theatre facilitation, social justice advocacy, and publishing. Given her experience, Angarika Guha is best placed to be the Project Coordinator of this Foundation Project of IFA.

The project titled Hands, Birds, Feet, Fish is an exploratory theatre research project, rooted in the physical experience of a neurological condition of the hand to lose grip. Drawing on the neuroscientific phenomenon of the “phantom limb”, the project will treat physical absence as a metaphor for systemic loss, displacement, and hidden trauma. By bringing together a diverse group of performers across varying caste, gender, age, and social contexts, the project will explore how bodily sensations, invisible to the eye, can be made visceral and shared through performance.  

The artistic process will integrate movement systems like Feldenkrais with non-verbal mime, oral histories, and anti-caste cultural instruments to probe deep-seated notions of touch, stigma, and physical labour. The work will unfold as a series of fragmented, non-linear vignettes that blend personal autobiography, historical events, and mythologies, focusing on the process of collective devising, deep listening, and everyday physical labour, rather than a polished theatrical outcome. 

The outcome of the project will be a series of collective devised theatre experiments, integrating Feldenkrais methods. The Project Coordinator’s deliverables to IFA along with the final report will be audio-visual and photographic documentation of the artistic process.   

This project suitably addresses the framework of IFA’s Arts Practice programme in the manner in which it attempts to build a collaborative space where the body functions as a repository of resilience, surfacing hidden memories, and restaging equilibrium through shared artistic practice.  

IFA will ensure that the implementation of this project happens in a timely manner and funds expended are accounted for. IFA will also review the progress of the project at midterm by convening an online gathering of artists coordinating Explorations projects. After the project is finished and all deliverables are submitted, IFA will put together a Final Evaluation to share with Trustees.