Aniconic
Shinjita Roy
A divine marriage of Indian heritage architecture and digital dance.
A divine wedding. A sacred site. What could possibly go wrong?
Aniconic invites audiences into the celestial wedding of Shiva and Parvati, unfolding through a breathtaking convergence of live performance, architecture, music and virtual reality. Two dancers activate an ancient South Indian temple world as the space transforms around them—unravelling and reimagining the rituals, hierarchies and expectations that shape ideas of marriage across caste, gender, sexuality and faith. Part performance, part installation, part digital pilgrimage, Aniconic blurs the boundaries between body and building, ritual and technology, the sacred and the speculative.
Created by architect and choreographer Shinjita Roy, the work draws on years of research into dance, heritage architecture and emerging technologies, asking how cultural memory is both preserved and policed. Using motion capture and virtual reality, Aniconic repositions the temple not as a fixed monument, but as a living, contested space—where myth, movement and contemporary experience collide. Audiences are invited not only to witness architecture, but to inhabit its shifting meanings.
A Melbourne Fringe premiere. Step inside the wedding procession and encounter a sacred world being remade in real time.
