Pickle Factory Season 5: Using dance to create spaces for collective healing

Each year, the Pickle Factory Dance Foundation—an artist-led not-for-profit in Kolkata— creates homes for dance in repurposed spaces. Titled ‘Holding Space’, it is a call to action and “an invitation to revisit what we stand for through the spaces we imagine, birth and experience together," stated the curatorial note. According to Vikram Iyenger, a Kolkata-based choreographer, curator, arts researcher and founder-director of the Pickle Factory Dance Foundation, believes that the annual event transforms unusual venues into performance spaces. The overarching idea of ‘Holding Space’—through performances such as ‘Can You Read my Body’ by tanzbar_bremen about the presence and absence of different bodies in space touching upon the topic of belonging performed by dancers with and without disabilities—has been to create areas of collective nurture and healing.