Get Lost In The Twirls Of This German-Indian Music Video

This story begins two years ago, with filmmaker Vikram Singh and electronic musician Nicolas Demuth in an apartment in Charlottenburg, Berlin. They were going over Nicolas’ new work - stage name Parra for Cuva - as well as his song Darwis, which had a 6-minute-long percussion ending. Their imaginations spun with the swirls of Dervish dancers to this tune, the two fit perfectly. As it turned out, Nicolas was working on a new EP titled ‘Mood in C’ with the label Project Mooncircle, and the duo realised that the dance would actually fit really well with this new work.

“We played the music over images of twirling dancers, and then I thought it could be cool to take this idea of a spinning dancer and maybe find an Indian connection to it. I thought about Kathak, and then we found Meera, or rather Gaurav as she was then known, through a video on YouTube called ‘105 Rounds in Kathak’, which had her spinning 105 times non-stop. I immediately knew we’d found our dancer,” Vikram, director of Parra for Cuva’s video for Mood In C, tells Homegrown.

With a small team, Vikram shot the video over two days in Mumbai. It features an incredible artistic collaboration between the German musician, Vikram, dancer Meera Sharma and artist Lekha Washington. Meera performs her own interpretation of Mood In C set to Nicolas’ tune, against the backdrop of Lekha’s installation ‘A Tornado Of Dervishes,’ and her moves are as powerful as her own life story. Born Gaurav Sharma, in Lucknow, this video sees her first performance following her move to Mumbai, sex reassignment surgery and transition from male to female.

The different aesthetics and styles came together fairly organically says Vikram, and Meera’s moves fit perfectly with Lekha’s twirling installation. “The challenge was to make sure we could get her to dance freely, and intensely, without getting hurt and without damaging the installation in any way. We didn’t have much time either - the installation and dancing around it had to be done in the course of an evening,” shares Vikram. The first part of the video was shot at St. Jude’s Bakery, in Bandra - “Big thanks to Chef Gresham Fernandes for letting us use that space!” - and the second at the Sakshi Gallery where Lekha was exhibiting her installation piece. “We had the crazy idea of sending out dancer spinning through her artwork - and surprisingly, she agreed,” muses Vikram.

”I’ve been a big fan of the label [Project Mooncircle] for a while- especially people like Robot Koch, Daisuke Tanabe and fLako, and when Nicolas told me he was releasing his next EP with them, it gave us an extra impetus to make this video as interesting as some of the previous visual output on the label,” he adds.

For Nicolas, the video turned out a lot differently than what he expected - “When I watched it the first time there were so many new ideas in it which was really refreshing. I guess so many things just happened spontaneously, which I always love. It turned out so beautifully,” he tells us over email, and we couldn’t agree more. “Mixing ideas is essential for my work and so it’s always very interesting when an artist from a different artistic background and form work on your idea and take it to new places. I think the video transports the intimacy of the music. As the story of the dancer is so extraordinary, it’s quite an experience to see her dance to the song.”

You can watch the stellar video for Mood In C below.