Anybody who has known love will know love conquers you in stages. It inches closer, it wrestles with you, and finally, it envelops you, like a garment. ‘Fall’, a series of short films conceptualised and directed by Gia Singh Arora, captures exactly this—the expression of love through dance. In the films, a dancer dances with a kanjivaram sari, not in it. The movement of the kanjivaram not only breaks it out of its traditional context, but reveals the flow of love, longing and loss with the sari as the focal point of these themes.

And Gia captures this flow in reverse.

The film’s reverse progression ends with a form familiar to you—the dancer in her kanjivaram. The form is brought apart at the beginning to show its beauty when it ultimately comes together, and the audience is left with elegant swirling images of vermillion, burgundy, scarlet, and crimson. At the centre of this nuanced series lies the kanjivaram itself, transformed into a character of its own to evoke a range of emotions and beautiful images of movement.

Gia relies on the ability of movement to augment her storytelling, and she strives to change the way we perceive an object or emotion. At 23, her artistic practice ranges between live performance, performance staged for the camera, and filmmaking. Training in Odissi and Somatics is the foundation from which her artistic intuitions and impulses arise. She has performed at Yoga Pela Paz, Brazil, ISKCON, Max Muller Bhavan, Delhi, Magnetic Fields Festival, Rajasthan, and Girnar Festival, Gujarat. She is currently working on two projects—The Performance Room, which explores the somatic relationship between camera and performer, and True Bone, an audio-visual film on Navtej Singh Johar’s Somatic Arts Practice. Gia believes in the exploration of film and performance through each other, by moving away from storytelling tropes and experiencing reality through her own mindful subjectivity.