Updated On: 28 April, 2024 07:06 AM IST | Mumbai | Tanya Syed
In To Stitch or Knot, celebrated designer Sandhya Raman explores how dance costumes create a visual vocabulary for audiences

After her first interaction with costume design, Raman has dressed stalwarts like Aditi Mangaldas, Geeta Chandran, Malavika Sarukkai, Anita Ratnam, and the late Astad Deboo. PIC COURTESY/SANDHYA RAMAN
What makes for a spectacle? When the curtains fall and the music fades away, what leaves the audience in a trance? When they leave the room, is it only the mudra that they remember? Is it only the movement and the rhythm that bring a performance to life? Sandhya Raman, an award-winning costume designer, curator, and textile activist, is of the belief that it is costumes that immortalise a show.
In 1990, Raman, then a design student and performing arts enthusiast, met American choreographer Jonathan Hollander at NID. The next year, she’d be working on “Moonbeam,” an Indo-American collaboration, where she dressed distinguished Indian classical dancer Mallika Sarabhai in a white Bengal cotton robe to make for a truly alluring sight. She reminisces about the sheer, textured fabric while speaking to mid-day about her costume showcase, To Stitch or Knot, at the Dilip Piramal Art Gallery, NCPA, as a part of their Mudra Dance Festival.