A new production of the 19th-century ballet La Bayadère at the Dutch National Opera & Ballet brings in Indian artists, folk forms, and visuals to challenge the ballet’s colonial, orientalist fantasy of India. We speak to Chennai based multi-disciplinary artist Tenma who worked as an artistic consultant and film director on the project. The conversation unpacks research and collaboration that went into reshaping what Indian dance forms can look and sound like on a European ballet stage.
Tenma picks up my call from Amsterdam, a few hours after the dress rehearsal of the Dutch National Ballet’s new production of 'La Bayadère'. The show has just received a standing ovation, and by evening, the company will premiere a radical reworking of a 19th-century ballet classic.
“This is a decolonisation project” Tenma says. “It is also about bringing in anti-caste conversations.” Known as the co-founder and band leader of The Casteless Collective, and music director for films like Pa Ranjith’s 'Natchathiram Nagargiradhu', Tenma has been working as a multi-disciplinary artist across music, film, and other art spaces.
“Priya brought me on board for two things,” he explains. “As an artistic consultant and as film director for the Indian research, showcases, and visuals that flood the stage”. He documented this journey with dancers and folk performance artists across the spectrum, alongside a committed team of technicians. “While the whole ballet is going on, there are visuals of India. I directed those videos, and worked with video designer Bowie Verschuuren,” he says.
La Bayadère was created in 1877 by French choreographer Marius Petipa for the Russian stage and follows the doomed love between Nikiya, a temple dancer, and Solor, a warrior. Petipa had never visited India, and as Dutch National Ballet artistic director Ted Brandsen has put it, the ballet offers “...a fantasized image of India”, built for exotic spectacle. To address this, the company is now presenting a new production of the ballet that preserves Petipa’s choreography while radically reworking it to confront orientalism, racism, and Dutch colonial history in India.
In Amsterdam, Brandsen, associate director and choreographer Rachel Beaujean, choreographer and scholar Dr. Priya Srinivasan, and choreographer and anthropologist Kalpana Raghuraman have chosen to keep much of Petipa’s choreography while radically rewriting the libretto, the text of the ballet.
The story now unfolds on the Coromandel coast during the Dutch East India Company era, and instead of a free floating Orientalist “ancient India”, the piece confronts the Dutch colonial empire and pays tribute to generations of Indian dancers who performed in Europe and shaped Western ballet and opera.
“It is the first time that Karagam dancers are present in a European ballet," says Tenma. A big part was to disrupt the narrow image of “Indian dance” that circulates in global pop culture and in ballet itself. “Usually when they depict India or Tamil Nadu, for example in Michael Jackson’s ‘Black or White’ music video, it is Bharatanatyam. One of those classical forms. It is never a folk form,” he says. “The idea of a temple dance has to be much broader."
Srinivasan mentions that, nineteenth-century dancers came from diverse backgrounds, but they were reduced to being ‘temple dancers’, which is incorrect. "In the production we use video footage to refer to their layered and complex history,” he says.
Here, he pushed for a different visual logic. “For me it is about multiplicity. We have Bharatanatyam dancers in the visuals as well; all of them together." The visuals feature luthier and musician Tharun Sekar, who plays the ancient Tamil instrument yaazh, from the Chennai group Urupaanar, alongside other performers like Mukesh Amaran, and Karagam dancers S Thanganila, S Poovizhi, and Priyadharshni.
What moved him most at the dress rehearsal was how this visual and sonic world sat inside one of Europe’s grandest ballet companies. “The first time I watched it yesterday, it was magnificent,” he says. “I have been shooting and putting this together for three years now. The live orchestra was performing while the Karagam visuals were moving, then they switch back to European ballet. It was unbelievable. I had never imagined it like that.”
In one of the great temples of European high culture, the “temple dancers” that La Bayadère once flattened are looking back. And for a moment, at least, they are doing so on their own terms.
La Bayadère runs at the Dutch National Opera & Ballet in Amsterdam from March 26 to April 19, 2026. You can find more information here.
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