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Keelaka Dance Company’s 'Rebel Ranis' is a dance-theatre musical that brings Kaikeyi, Sita, Draupadi, and Karaikal Ammaiyar together to reimagine their stories through Bharatanatyam, contemporary dance, theatre and live Tamil jazz. The production explores agency, power, desire, trauma, motherhood, beauty and liberation, and tours Bangalore, Hyderabad, Pune and Mumbai this September.
Founded in 2024 by Guru Jyotsna Shourie and her long-standing disciple Aneesha Grover, Delhi-based Keelaka Dance Company works at the 'unruly' end of classical dance, stretching Bharatanatyam into theatre, film, spoken word and immersive storytelling. Their work digs into ancient scriptures, goddess traditions, and lived realities through the female gaze, with women’s voices pushed to the front of the performance. This September, the company brings Rebel Ranis, a dance-theatre musical that puts four women from Indian mythology — Kaikeyi, Sita, Draupadi, and Karaikal Ammaiyar — in the same room, across time, to wrestle back control of stories that have usually been told through someone else’s gaze.
Inspired by the writings of American playwright and feminist V (formerly Eve Ensler), Rebel Ranis takes the form of visceral, deeply personal confessions, cutting into the roles handed to women in traditional myths and epics. The production looks at women who are often reduced to damsels in distress, silent sufferers or powerful goddesses whose divinity still leaves them caught inside patriarchal structures. Bharatanatyam, contemporary dance, theatre and live Tamil jazz come together as Kaikeyi, Sita, Draupadi, and Karaikal Ammaiyar tell their own versions of events. Their stories move through agency, power, desire, violence, identity, beauty and liberation, with scripture itself becoming a place for rebellion.
The four women also come with very different kinds of resistance. Kaikeyi’s story takes on the post-partum collision of motherhood and power; Draupadi gets to reinterpret her trauma; Karaikal Ammaiyar throws out the usual rules around feminine beauty; and Sita appears as an elemental force drawn from the Adbhuta Ramayana. For Aneesha Grover, the legends are a way into a much more current conversation about agency, power, and desire. She describes Rebel Ranis as a refusal to inherit the idea that a woman’s strength has to come at the cost of her freedom. The production’s music comes from MadStarBase, Dr Himanshu Srivastava, Harini Iyer, Dr O.S. Arun, and Daniel B George, with a cast including Aneesha, Nandita Kalaan, Amrita Sivakumar, Benjamin Jacob, Sagar Vashisht, Ravi Yadav, Harini Iyer, Seejal PS, and Akshiti Menon.
Rebel Ranis tours Bangalore, Hyderabad, Pune, and Mumbai this month, starting at Medai – The Stage in Bangalore on September 23, followed by Rangbhoomi Spaces in Hyderabad on September 24 and The Box in Pune on September 26. The tour ends with a special performance at Mumbai’s Royal Opera House on September 27. Tickets are Rs 499 across all four shows, and proceeds from every ticket sold will go to Aks Foundation, a Pune-based organisation working towards the prevention of gender-based violence.
