Documenting Performing Arts

Just a few images from 15 years of Documenting Performing arts. As traditions vanish, we lose embodied knowledge, memory, and spiritual heritage.

Documenting the performing arts is akin to facing the climate crisis: it means witnessing a largely invisible erosion. As traditional practices disappear, we lose more than performances. We lose embodied knowledge, collective memory, and spiritual heritage carried through breath, gesture, rhythm, and ritual.

Across Asia, masters of forms such as Kathakali, Gotipua, or Mallakhamb speak of the same decline. These are not spectacles but disciplines of the soul, where each movement is a codified language and a form of devotion. Fewer young people can now afford the time, rigor, and surrender these traditions demand.

In many cultures, theater is not entertainment but a way of being, woven into daily life and cosmology. Its disappearance is therefore not only cultural, but spiritual. In a world obsessed with speed and efficiency, the slow path of transmission is becoming fragile.

My work is not about the exotic or romanticism. It is an act of witnessing and archiving, a visual anthropology of fading knowledge. I photograph to remember, to honor, and to preserve. Art is memory. And in documenting it, I try to listen, learn, and humbly remember.