Review: Bibi Rukiya’s Reckless Daughter — Amina Khayyam Dance Company at The Place 4 & 5 November 2025

‘Through a blend of traditional vocabulary and contemporary embodiment, Amina Khayyam reclaims Kathak as both weapon and wound.’ ★★★★

As a woman of East Asian origin, I often find myself awkwardly positioned between Western feminism and the patriarchal systems embedded in my traditional culture. I am expected to defend one to the other — without ever fully belonging to either — and often end up questioned by both. It was this tension that I experienced while watching Bibi Rukiya’s Reckless Daughter.

Inspired by García Lorca’s The House of Bernarda Alba, Amina Khayyam’s new work explores how women can become the gatekeepers of patriarchy — policing and punishing other women in the name of honour and protection. Blending Kathak with modern dance, the piece unfolds a generational dialogue between obedience and rebellion. It is not a performance to simply watch, but one to study and unpack.

Khayyam and her all-female ensemble reveal a tangled inheritance. For women, Kathak is both their cultural language and a mirror of constraint. Their movement carries centuries of repression and resilience — not just through narrative, but through the form itself.

Kathak, which literally means “to tell a story,” was long denied to women. Excluded under ritual purity taboos until the 15th century, female dancers later re-emerged as courtesans and storytellers, only to be shamed by colonial anti-nautch campaigns and reframed by nationalist reformers as a chaste, upper-caste male art. After independence, women re-entered the form, but under the gaze of moral respectability. In the diaspora, Kathak has evolved again — as a language of agency, protest, and identity.

Khayyam’s work sits precisely at this crossroads.  Through a blend of traditional vocabulary and contemporary embodiment, she reclaims Kathak as both weapon and wound. Her commitment to including marginalised communities through dance expands her practice as a tool of social change. This performance carries centuries of history — translating the tangled lineage of the form into modernism and beyond.

Bibi Rukiya’s Reckless Daughter is a beautifully performed, thematically rich, and quietly radical meditation on how women internalise and challenge the systems that shape them.

https://aminakhayyamdance.co.uk/