Amina Khayyam Dance Company to perform as part of A Weekend Without Walls Festival tour

Amina Khayyam Dance Company to perform You&Me this summer at Without Walls festival partners: Brighton Festival, Certain Blacks – Ensemble Festival (London) and Greenwich+Docklands International Festival.

Nominated for the National Dance Awards 2022 – Amina Khayyam Dance Company (AKDC) makes touring dance theatre work using the South Asian dance Kathak as the core narrative.

You&Me is about Man meets Man… discovering a state of happiness he has never known before; but he has a wife and family at home. You&Me confronts the cultural status quo attitudes towards sexuality.

Amina Khayyam Dance Company works in collaboration with those who are culturally least engaged, economically challenged and societally disenfranchised. You&Me was developed because of AKDC’s programme of workshops with women’s community groups. The women shared their real-life experiences of a marriage where their partner could not express his sexuality for fear of bringing shame to the family. This experience has been developed with two LGBTQ+ performers from their imagining his perspective.

You&Me features original music performed live by internationally acclaimed musicians – Debasish Mukherjee on tabla, Jonathan Mayer on tenor sitar and Iain McHugh on cello.

Artistic Director Amina Khayyam said: “The theme in You&Me was developed following our workshops with women’s groups and explores the subject of being openly gay. The conversations in the workshops made it clear that this is still taboo in the South Asian community and is a subject many are in denial about. The rise in the ‘marriage of convenience’ has become the norm because of pressures to marry and not bring shame on the family. These marriages, often arranged, affect the lives of women who are trapped in marriages they didn’t sign up for and for the men, they cannot be their true self, often living double lives”

Visit https://aminakhayyamdance.co.uk/you-me for further information.