Dance Like a Man
Written by Mahesh Dattani | Directed by Lillete Dubey
Venue: Gyan Manch
Date: 29th November, 2026
What happens when one generation’s unfinished ambitions shape the life of the next? KCC presents Dance Like a Man, written by Mahesh Dattani and directed by Lillete Dubey. The play follows Bharatanatyam dancers Jairaj and Ratna as their daughter Lata stands on the threshold of a promising career. Her success brings old compromises, jealousies and tensions around gender, family and artistic identity back to the surface. Balancing humour with darker undercurrents, this celebrated production has been performed more than 700 times and now comes to Kolkata as part of the 7th edition of AMI Arts Festival.
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Kolkata Centre for Creativity presents Dance Like a Man, written by Mahesh Dattani and directed by Lillete Dubey for The Primetime Theatre Company.
At the centre of the play are Jairaj and Ratna, two Bharatanatyam dancers whose careers and marriage carry the weight of ambitions, compromises and unresolved conflicts. Their daughter Lata, now on the verge of establishing herself as a dancer, brings those tensions back to the surface.
As one generation watches another move towards the success it once desired, questions of ambition, gender, family and artistic identity begin to emerge.
The play handles these conflicts with humour as much as seriousness, moving between affection, resentment and irony without reducing the family to simple heroes or villains.
With more than 700 performances, Dance Like a Man has had an unusually long life on the Indian stage and you finally get to see it at the 7th edition of AMI Arts Festival, 20th Nov – 20th Dec, ’26.
Mahesh Dattani is a playwright and recipient of the Sahitya Akademi Award.
Lillete Dubey is an actor, director and Artistic Director of The Primetime Theatre Company. Her work has championed original Indian writing in English across a theatre career spanning several decades.
The production features performers including Ananth Mahadevan, Joy Sengupta and Suchitra Pillai.
