Distinct | Annikki Chand
Dancer and actor Annikki Chand’s creative development with Mad Dance and Metro Arts was not going to plan. On Monday morning, four days before her creative development showing, Annikki decided to throw all her work out and start afresh. Come Friday afternoon, in the studio space above Metro Arts, Annikki Chand made the intimate crowd come alive. I’m talking clapping, clicking, wooing, whooping, and the various other noises audiences make to convey their enthusiasm for what’s going down onstage.
I don’t open with ‘this show was created in four days’ as a way of lowering your expectations. In fact, quite the contrary; the fact that Annikki was able to create a work covering hefty themes of identity, culture and gender in such an entertaining way was nothing short of amazing.
When the lights went down, Annikki launched into a preamble, meandering around the stage with a suitcase. However, it wasn’t until she threw on a persistently limp wig and strutted around the stage clutching her crotch, that the show really began. This character was a pageant host, and he introduced us to the other three characters of the show: Apu a Bollywood dancer from Chermside, Karen from the Gold Coast and lastly, the real life Annikki. The portrayal of these four characters were thoroughly distinct in both facial expressions and movement, and it was wonderful to see Annikki’s skills as a dancer and actor coalesce to create these larger-than-life personalities.
During the post-show artist talk, Annikki revealed that the pageant contestants were chosen largely at random. But I think Annikki hit the nail on the head, as these distinctly different characters raised questions of a fragmented identity. We had the traditional Indian dancer, the beautiful but vapid Aussie beach babe, and then Annikki in her current form, a half Finnish, half Indian woman busting it out in the male dominated world of Krump. For something chosen at random, I think the relationship between the unequivocal characters (Apu and Karen) and Annikki’s fragmented identity is a rich site to mine during future development.
Another element that I’d love to see Annikki lean into are the less palatable reasons for identity clashes and struggles to connect to culture. For the most part, the show’s tone was light-hearted and comical, but towards the end there was a feeling that something darker was lingering just below the surface. The word ‘authentic identity’ gets bandied about, but for Annikki, there are tangible reasons that understanding her cultural identity and her identity as a female dancer in Krump have been so politicised. Many who came before Annikki were not granted the right to self-determine their identity. But here Annikki is, doing just that, but at what cost? In the Q&A I got the feeling that audiences were interested in the consequences of this self-determination. Not to endorse trauma porn, but if this darkness is of interest to Annikki then I encourage her to explore it.
Suffice to say that if these are the sort of questions Annikki has been able to raise after working on this show for four days, then who knows what might come out of a lengthier development process. Here’s to hoping that one day we’ll get the chance to find out.
