Gabbu Kathe explores waste and sustainability through dance and theatre

We are living in an era where the objects we discard often have more to say than the ones we keep. Every plastic bottle, crumpled receipt and stray wrapper is a testament to a consumerist fever dream — a legacy of convenience that we leave behind. But what if that refuse could dance? What if the mountains of waste piling up at the city’s periphery were not just debris, but characters waiting for their turn on stage? Dancers Keerthi Kumar and Roopa Krishnamurthy have spent the last few months finding the hidden stories within our own excess, transforming our overflowing landfills into a sharp, satirical stage production. Ahead of their upcoming performance of their dance-drama Gabbu Kathe, they open up about how they turned a conversation on environmental neglect into a performance and share their vision for the future of storytelling.

Keerthi Kumar and Roopa Krishnamurthy open up on their latest production, Gabbu Kathe

“It’s a playful dance-drama work about a young ragpicker girl who encounters Gabbu — the Garbage King, a fantastical being created from all the waste we throw away,” Roopa explains. The piece was commissioned by Masoom Parmar as part of BLR Hubba — a citywide arts and culture festival in Bengaluru — and developed as a way to engage younger audiences with a subject that is often difficult to approach directly. For Keerthi, the character-building process was the highlight of their journey. “Gabbu, in particular, allowed for a lot of play — his personality, his quirks, the way he speaks and moves,” Keerthi tells us.

The visual identity of Gabbu Kathe is equally resourceful, mirroring the production’s central theme of reuse. “A lot of the props come from our own homes and friends, so there’s familiarity built into the world,” Keerthi adds, noting that they stitched gunny bags together to create a screen for the performance. “Movement-wise, we draw from kathak, Indian contemporary dance, mime and physical theatre, creating a language that shifts between rhythmic precision and fluid expression,” Keerthi explains. Audiences can expect an experience that is as introspective as it is entertaining. “We hope audiences leave with a sense of awareness — nothing overwhelming, but a subtle shift in how they view waste and their everyday actions,” Roopa says.

As they look towards the future, the duo, through their studio ARTMOS — a Bengaluru-based collective focused on creating original dance-drama productions — is already pivoting to a different aesthetic. “We are currently working on a new historical dance production on Samudragupta, as part of a commission by Param Culture,” Keerthi shares. “It’s a very different direction from Gabbu Kathe and we’re excited to explore history, scale and narrative in a new way,” he concludes.

Entry free. May 3, 11.30 am onwards. At BIC, Domlur.

(Anoushka Kundu is an intern at Indulge)

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