Love Less Tender looks at the complexity of love and pleasure through the Sanskrit scripture, Kama Sutra. The piece, a danced, spoken and sung conversation between choreographer Raghav Handa, performer and writer Nicholas Brown, and dancer Franky Drousioti, explores the motivations behind and the borders that lie between love and pleasure and how they are shaped by personal, cultural and contemporary forces. What would you do for love? Is it ever too much? Is pleasure always guilty?
For most people, Kama Sutra conjures images of contortionist sex positions, but the real focus of the script is on emotional self-fulfilment and social behaviour – the ethics of desire, love, pleasure, liberty and control. Containing seven chapters and sixty-four principles, Kama Sutra teaches us the language of love and how to become a ‘human absolute’.
Love Less Tender is a highly physical and conversational piece that brings the audience into the colour, intimacy and absurdity of Kama Sutra. With humour and sensuality, the performers will challenge the themes of love, pleasure and control through our contemporary socio-political lens and contrast them with the positions taken in Kama Sutra. In some ways it is an act of defiance as the work pulls back the façade of self-consciousness, allowing the audience to laugh at themselves
