Review of Baby Rukia’s Troubled Daughter – Lorca’s Mother Stirs a Tragic Dance of Desire | platform

I Admire the work of Amina Khayyam. The Slough-based dancer and choreographer has made pieces about domestic abuse (Bird), sex (You and Me) and promiscuous women (Punk). She often works in consultation with community groups, drawing on the lives of marginalized and underrepresented women. Rooted in North Indian Kathak dance, it has an unforced authority to its movement, a smoothness and certainty, that draws your attention towards it.

But Khayyam’s latest work, “Bibi Ruqaya’s Reckless Daughter,” doesn’t quite hit home. It is partly inspired by Federico García Lorca’s book The House of Bernarda Alba, the story of a grieving, tyrannical mother who isolates her five daughters in an oppressive home. Khayyam’s work is the story of how families and mothers perpetuate patriarchal systems by replicating the oppression they themselves experienced.

The matriarch in the tale is perhaps a fascinating character for Khayyam to explore – the tensions between tradition and honour, respect and freedom, and fear and the love you have for your children. In this version, Bibi Ruqayya has three daughters, most of them standing in line – mother and daughter dancing together, at a distance but in sync. The other two are more teary-eyed, and want to wear high heels and dance to Bollywood pop tunes to Beyoncé – at least until their mother’s ghost puts a lid on their fun.

Rather than authoritarian, Khayyam is a distant figure at times, muted by disapproval. In fact, the entire show is fairly silent. There is a low-level tension, like the anxious shimmer of bells on dancer Abirami Eswar’s ankles. But the seriousness and real detail of the subject matter – the question of what these women desire and in what way they are thwarted, the texture of their emotions, the complexity of the characters and the dynamics of their families – is absent. Everything ends in tragedy but is tinged with confusion.

In addition to Lorca, the story is based on the experience of one of the women who participated in tent community groups. There is powerful real-life testimony at the heart of this work, but there is much more left unsaid.