A Story is a Stepwell is an Underground River

A Story is a Stepwell is an Underground River is a 5-10 minute lyrical video poem by an Indian poet, evoking the feeling of waking from an afternoon dream—fantastical, wide-ranging, emerging, receding—a slow unfolding that resists revealing everything at once.

The motifs explored include stepwells, the drought-ridden lands of Kutch in India where the artist's ancestors are from, the underground rivers that feed the wells, migration, movement, and ancestry.

The poem connects the artist’s own family history, reflecting on their move away from Kutch and the search for a great grandmother's story. Yet, it also touches on the universal idea of hidden stories within families—where they come from and what we do with them.

About Tishani Doshi

Tishani Doshi is an award-winning poet, dancer, and novelist. She has published six books of fiction and poetry. Her most recent books are, Girls Are Coming Out of the Woods, a collection of poems, shortlisted for the Ted Hughes Award and published in the USA (Copper Canyon Press), UK (Bloodaxe) and India (HarperCollins) — and a novel, "Small Days and Nights," published in the USA (Norton) and UK, India, and Australia (Bloomsbury), and forthcoming in several languages. The body is central to Doshi's work. For fifteen years she worked as the lead dancer of legendary Indian choreographer Chandralekha's troupe and performed on stages all over the world. She is currently writing a memoir on dance and the body.

She is the recipient of the All India Poetry Competition and the Forward Prize for Best First Collection. Her fiction has been shortlisted for the Hindu Award and longlisted for the Orange Prize and the IMPAC Dublin Literary Award. She has also received grants from the UK Arts Council and has been a fellow at the Santa Maddalena Foundation and at Art OMI. She has given keynote speeches at the Sorbonne University, St Martin's Book Fair and the Shangri-La Salon in London; has given a TED Talk "The Luxury of Slowness" and has opened several literary festivals with a combination of spoken word and dance including The Blue Mountains Festival in Australia, the Lillehammer Festival in Norway, and presented her work at the Dubai Art Fair, and fifty other literary and art festivals worldwide. She has served on the jury for the Forward Poetry Prize, the Prada-Feltrinelli Literary Prize, the Dylan Thomas Prize, and the Shakti Bhatt First Book Award.

Event Venue & Nearby Stays

The Yard Alserkal Avenue, 4 17th Street, Dubai, United Arab Emirates