What happens when Ms Pac-Man meets Indian dance?

Ms Pac-Man and her 1980s video game contemporaries may not seem the most obvious inspiration for classical Indian dance routines. But three performers are channelling the 8-bit characters for their latest venture.

Bradford Arts Centre has awarded Kavya Iyer, Devaki Rajendran and Sneha Semaleesan £10,000 for their project to create semi-improvised Bharatanatyam shows.

The centre's Kala Sangam Commission supports the creation of performance work featuring classical Indian art forms.

The London-based dancers have begun work on the project, with the aim of a premiere performance at Bradford Arts Centre in 2028.

Semaleesan says the project arose from the question: "What if we could gamify the experience of improvisation?

"Kavya had done an exploration in this space, which looked a bit like Pac-Man.

"And that's what led us to inquire further into what did video games of that era look like?

"There's also a social connotation to it all, especially when it comes to Ms Pac-Man, which is, well, the female version of Pac-Man, about how the mazes are harder and it's a trickier game.

"And we wondered whether it is because it's a woman trying to navigate through the world?"

When you play a game, "you don't know what's going to happen", says Iyer, who likes to play Snake and Super Mario.

"So we're actually playing a live game as the performance is going on. So that's why we thought the element of improvisation would be so important because that marries with the idea of the fact that a game is different each time."

Bradford Arts Centre received more than 40 applications for the funding, saying the winner had found an "innovative new way to tell stories through Bharatanatyam".

CEO Alex Croft says the panel were "captivated by the question of what happens when Bharatanatyam enters a video game, and how the three dancers will each be bringing their voices and experiences together to create the work".

Bradford Arts Centre began as Kala Sangam in 1993 to champion South Asian dance in Bradford.

After a rebrand and refurbishment for Bradford City of Culture 2025, it was renamed - but it remains committed to its dance roots.

Bharatanatyam is one of the oldest and most popular classical Indian dance forms, noted for its fixed upper torso and flexed knees.

It has become a "very codified art form", says Iyer - and improvisation has faded as performances get shorter and the cultural traditions around the dance become narrower.

"We lost that school of improvisation because we had like live musicians, and it was practised by a community of practitioners who had musicians and dancers living together," explains Rajendran.

"And with the reform and the revolution and nationalist movement in India, colonialism, history, independence, all of those things.

"So with the nationalist movement coming in, the shift happened and then we changed the structure and format of the form that we used to practise and has become what we do now, which is very codified, which has too many rules."

The project will also explore ideas of gender – a topic at the forefront of discourse in India, they say.

Rajendran explains how an advert for a Hindu festival was recently removed from television after controversy over the neckline of a woman's dress.

Bollywood actor Kriti Sanon was shown celebrating the festival in which sisters tie a thread called Rakhi over their brothers' wrists, wearing a cropped top, skirt and a cape.

"In India, even at this point, women are being policed over what to wear," says Rajendran.

"And public media becomes a space where these things really are happening. So then this question of progressiveness and women's autonomy over their bodies, over their rights - these current and past histories are very relevant in what we are exploring."

Despite the political influences on Bharatanatyam, Iyer, Rajendran and Semaleesan agree their desire to explore and push the artform is born out of a love for it.

"We thoroughly believe that the form in itself is quite vast. It is traditional for sure, but it's actually also modern because it allows us that flexibility," says Semaleesan.

"And we do acknowledge that it has shaped our practice, it has shaped our thinking, it has shaped who we are. And actually, that is the beauty of this art form," adds Rajendran.

"It is very much out of love that we are doing this. We are asking the questions because we really have grown up with the form. And it has done something to us, essentially, on the way we think, the way we behave, the way we perform."

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