One might be tempted to decode Elephant Song’s symbolism: to spend hours retracing its threads in search of a key, only to end up drained and uncertain.
I might even be speaking from experience.
Kush Shah’s play has the texture of a dream. To watch it is to surrender to a flow of oneiric images, each charged with meanings one cannot quite pin down. What follows, then, is my attempt to sit with that unsettling and fascinating slipperiness: a set of four notes I took after waking from this show, which resists the stark, cold logic of daylight.
A dream journal, of sorts.
Note 1: Death… and money
In Mumbai, B (Arjun Kalra) works in the death-benefits department, a municipal office responsible for issuing relief cheques to the families of people killed in accidents. Anyone who has had to survive someone else’s death knows that strange, dreamlike feeling: the shock of loss, followed almost immediately by paperwork.
B keeps the machinery of bureaucracy moving cleanly, hurried along by his commanding co-worker A (Chirag Motwani), who reminds him not to waste too much time on any one person. They both try not to get caught up in the grief of those who arrive at the counter. Instead, they focus on more concrete things: chicken masala, office chatter, and the day’s newspaper.
When the paper mentions a new bridge being built, B and A begin betting on how long it will take before the structure collapses. In this world, the failure of public infrastructure is almost a certainty. Distrust in government is not cynicism: it’s simply critical thinking.
Note 2: Privacy… and desire
On the right side of the stage sits B’s bedroom: the messy territory of his private life. It is where his mother (Suma Suresh), the only family he has left after his father’s death, occasionally comes to visit. It is also where he brings K (Kush Shah), a man he once met on a streetcar and took home for a hookup.
B works for the government; K works with the police. B was raised Hindu; K is Muslim. Their queer attraction clashes with religious loyalties and heteronormative orders, gathering unspoken pressures that are larger than the room. B seems at ease with his own flamboyant energy: we see this in the way Kalra’s slender frame moves sinuously through the room. K, by contrast, is less certain. Shah portrays him as both tentative and defensive: unsure how to name himself, and confused about what that recognition would demand of him. To question his sexuality is not only to admit desire, but to feel the ground of identity shift beneath his feet.
Note 3: Dream… and dance
Sound is the tightly woven fabric that holds this story together. Traditional Indian music frames each scene, with tabla (Natesh Persaud), sitar (Dhruv Sodha), synth (Kabir Agarwal), and voice (Utsav Alok) moving in a spellbinding flow. This outstanding ensemble pulls the stage into B’s dream states, creating strange, hazy visions in which memory and grief blur together.
Here, B’s hallucinations take physical form in two dancers (Rohee Uberoi and Ranganathan Rajan), their bodies rippling like cloth in the wind. They curve, turn, arabesque, and fold through a contemporary dance vocabulary inflected by Kathak gestures. At times, B’s father (Harsh Prajapati) also appears in these visions. Sometimes, his body is dragged across the stage like a corpse from some obscure nightmare. At others, he joins the dancers in a clustered formation that briefly, almost subliminally, suggests the shape of an elephant.
Note 4: The elephant in the room
There are Indian stories of winged elephants, creatures once able to fly before being brought down to earth. Perhaps that is one way to read the airy, suspended quality of the choreography: the dancers’ bodies seem to gather wind, cradle it… and then release it.
The phrase “the elephant in the room” usually names the obvious thing no one wants to acknowledge. Here, the elephant is not only something that must be faced, but something that cannot be mastered by simple explanation. Death, desire, and grief all resist easy encapsulation and meaning.
Why does death come? Why is the world unjust? Why do systems collapse? Why does life insist on moving when all one wants is to stop? These questions are the elephant in the room: too large, too strange, and too dreamlike to master.
But perfect to sing on the stage.
Elephant Song, presented by Pensive Cat and CinemaClub, ran at Aki Studio, Native Earth Performing Arts until June 14, 2026. More information is available here.
© Alessandro Starcuzzi, Sesaya Arts Magazine 2026
