Mrityu is a new cross-artform performance work by Carnatic musician and performer Arjunan Puveendran exploring the processing of death through rituals, drawing largely from South Asian rituals and arts heritages, re-contextualised for an Australian audience.
It is a performance of shared narratives using a distinctive merging of monologues, music, ritual, and movement from the perspective of an observer – not mourner, dying or deceased. The work responds to the post-pandemic environment exploring how we have become desensitised to death, juxtaposed against the pain of not being able to grieve, mourn or perform rituals in customary ways.
The work was seeded through the Rescue-Restart fund offered by Create NSW and will receive a further creative development in 2023.
This cross-artform work merges music, dance, movement and spoken word to explore the processing of death and the meaning we imbue into rituals as part of mourning – rooted in South Asian rituals particularly drawing from Sri Lankan Tamil practices.
