Bodies Have Stories is a multidisciplinary artistic exploration, conceptualised and directed by Mayuri Upadhya, celebrated danseuse, choreographer, and Artistic Director of Nritarutya. Known for her striking imagination and her ability to translate emotion into visual poetry, Mayuri brings to this work her signature blend of depth, aesthetics, and fearless storytelling.
With Bodies Have Stories, Mayuri delves into the body as an archive of lived experience, a vessel that remembers, transforms, and reveals. Through dance, photography, and interviews, the project reflects on identity, resilience, and the beauty of imperfection. It uncovers the silent narratives etched in our skin, the memories carried in our movements, and the ways our bodies bear witness to both pain and triumph.
“ Death is there-its destiny but
What story do I stand for?”
Bodies Have Stories
This artistic series is born from the same source and finds expression through three distinct visual media — and four interviews that ground the work in the lived realities of people whose bodies defy traditional definitions of beauty and identity, photographs that capture the artistry, movement, and form of the body and a screen dance that explores the creative and fantastical ways our bodies wish to be heard. Together, they reveal not just the human form, but the myriad ways it holds and expresses stories that challenge and transcend convention.
This work extends Mayuri’s ongoing pursuit to make dance a medium of inquiry and reflection, not just performance. Bodies Have Stories invites us to shift our gaze, to look beyond the surface and listen to what the body has been trying to say all along. To recognise that every scar is a memory, every movement a revelation, and every body, in its strength and fragility, a story waiting to be told.
Photographs
The Film
Interviews
Interviews
In this compelling series of conversations, Bodies Have Stories brings together voices of remarkable individuals — survivors, creators, and changemakers — who have each redefined their relationship with their bodies in profound ways. From navigating physical transformation and public scrutiny to embracing identity beyond convention, these interviews uncover the courage it takes to be seen as we truly are.
“ What role does your body play in your story?
How does my body want to be represented and heard? ”
Through the journeys of Sunitha Atinus, Neethu Shetty, Deepti Chandy, and Zeeshan Ali, we witness stories of healing, resilience, and self-acceptance. Each dialogue becomes an act of reclamation — a reminder that our bodies are not mere vessels, but living testaments to endurance, evolution, and truth.
Photographs
The photographic series within Bodies Have Stories captures the language of the body in its purest, most unguarded form. Each frame becomes a canvas where movement pauses, revealing the delicate intersection of vulnerability and strength, stillness and motion, reality and imagination.
Through light, texture, and gesture, these images explore how the body carries memory and how every curve, scar, and shadow becomes a record of lived experience. They invite the viewer to look beyond aesthetics, to see the raw humanity that lies within form.
“I am morethan my body,
theshapes and curves..”
These photographs are not portraits of perfection, but reflections of truth. They celebrate the resilience of the human spirit and the poetry that lives within our skin. In every image, the body tells a story, of survival, connection, and becoming.
The Film
Bodies Have Stories is an evocative movement film that delves into the profound relationship between the body, memory, and identity. It explores the idea that our bodies are living archives, vessels that hold the imprints of everything we have experienced, endured, and overcome. Every bruise, scar, and gesture becomes a testimony, carrying truths far more potent than the mind’s recollections.
In this work, Mayuri Upadhya steps into the role of both storyteller and seeker, using dance as a language of inquiry and revelation. The film moves between abstraction and emotion, from the physicality of pain to the quiet strength of healing, questioning the ways we define beauty, perfection, and worth. It asks: If the mind can shape the body, can the body too shape the mind? Can our scars remind us not of defeat, but of victory?
Through striking imagery, movement, and sound, Bodies Have Stories becomes a metaphorical diary of the human experience, of being stretched, held, shattered, and yet, finding ways to celebrate love, resilience, and truth. It is not a story of flawlessness, but of courage, a reminder that our bodies do not just move through life; they remember, reveal, and become it.
Mayuri Upadhya Intro
Bodies Have Stories
