New Indra (The Breaking of English Water)

New Indra (The Breaking of English Water)
2020
Single Channel Video
Duration: 11:03 mins
Directed by Lilian Nejatpour
Filmed remotely during first UK lockdown
Original Score by Lilian Nejatpour
Performed by Daisy Cauty
DOP Alfie Cauty

New Indra (The Breaking of English Water) explores the relationship between the pregnancy, writing and dreams. Taking influence from Indra, the Vedic deity of water, the work investigates the fluid, subconscious labour of dreams and the connection to foreign lands, language and identity. A dancer in her third trimester responds to her dreams through choreography and physical mark-making. She becomes a semiotic agent, rewriting a history beyond representations of motherhood, which is often prescribed to the pregnant subject in psychoanalysis. The pregnant body subverts this binary position by “inscribing speech through movement” (Hélène Cixous- The Laugh of Medusa). Set during the UK lockdown, the film captures radio stations bleeding through walls and news channels speaking in different tongues. British and Iranian transmissions intertwine as dual identities, similar to the pregnant dyad. The leaky over-spill of these environments informs the sonic composition of the film, highlighting the enclosed parameters of production and linearity of time that closely resembles a dream state.