A performance event devised and directed by artist Sonia Khurana.

‘Staged’ on the sidelines of the larger events, Khurana proposes to insert a provocation by playfully inviting passersby to lie down on the ground.
The bodies lying thus are continually documented, described or circumscribed.

“Beginning literally, with affecting a change in the participant’s visual perspective, this simple act of lying down soon begins to resonate with multiple layers of oblique suggestions that are to do with dismantling the norms of protected life, ranging from resistance, friction, contamination, dispossession, to the absurd and the allegorical. Autographical traces drawn on the ground transform a singular act into a collective utterance.”

“Lying-down” aims to work on various registers, across diverse contexts and audiences. By employing a fairly simple, essential and non-threatening form of social interaction Khurana has been able to draw large numbers of audiences to participate into this act of lying down.

For the fourteenth Bharat Rang Mahotsav Sonia Khurana will work with a core group of participants to invite a mutual exchange of the experience of simply lying down in a theatre. Here “lying down..” is conceptualized to begin as an almost-imperceptible performance event that culminates with the making of a performance drawing, drawn out of traces of bodies of people lying down.

The gesture of lying down is a group action: at once futile and heroic, absurd and poetic.
The bodies lying thus are continually documented, described or circumscribed.