Bodies Have Stories is a multidisciplinary artistic exploration conceptualised and directed by Mayuri Upadhya, celebrated danseuse, choreographer, and Artistic Director of Nritarutya.
In Bodies Have Stories, she 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 unseen narratives shaped by struggle and grace, the memories carried in movement, and the truths our bodies speak through form and stillness.
The series unfolds through three distinct visual mediums—photography, interviews, and films, each offering a lens into the body’s expressive power.
“ Death is there-its destiny but
What story do I stand for? “
Bodies Have Stories
Through intimate interviews, or Vaachika, the work captures real voices and lived experiences of resilience and becoming. The still photography segment, or Aangika, redefines how we see the body — beyond form or beauty — offering a raw, visual, and journalistic perspective. The culminating dance film, exploring the spirit of Satvika, becomes a surreal, interpretive passage through emotion, abstraction, and memory.
Together, these expressions form the pulse of Bodies Have Stories, extending Mayuri Upadhya’s vision of dance as inquiry rather than performance. It invites us to look beyond aesthetics, to listen, to witness, and to honour every body as a living story of strength, memory, and transformation.
Photographs
The Film
Interviews
Vāchika
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.
Āngika
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.
Sātvika
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
