What's the Matter? - A Guduguduppukkari production

What happens when the measure of matter becomes more important than matter itself? When measuring your body becomes more important than your body itself? When patriarchal measures limit your living connection to your body, your being, to what matters to you?

In What’s the Matter? personal experience meets physical theatre… In this hour long, deeply quirky piece Anitha explores losing connection to the maternal matrix, complicated by the patriarchal drive towards ideal and perfection and finding her way back into the energies of the universal feminine via dreams, bodily experience and embodied writing.

Audience response to "What’s the Matter?"

“Anitha takes the matter and the implosive what question and turn them on the pivot of personal work, dream work, and just so much candour of tragedy and comedy that life entails. So many threads unnervingly came undone. And I found myself folding and unfolding my knees and legs around the chest to protect myself and then again make myself vulnerable. Words and prayers out to women who work on themselves so that inspiration and awareness and performance and good literature go on” -

Laxmi Priya, Playback Theatre-maker

“Today, I was with Anitha Santhanam in her realities,dreams and her journeys. She navigates the stereotypes that haunt us in a fluid way. She asks questions and shares slices of her struggles, realisations and reflections. Her relationships with herself, her body and the universe manifests in a range of moments, moods and matter. Warm and Wild. Soft and Sharp. Real and rooted. Niranjan’s lighting makes it more intimate.”

Aruna Ganeshram, Theatre Director

About Guduguduppukari

The group was founded by Sunandha Raghunathan and Anitha Santhanam in 2015 to ‘create theatre out of a fully embodied exploration, including the personal and the political, intellect and emotion, rigour and play, form and content and actively facilitate a feminine exploration in the theatre space - both creation and conversation, without apology or obeisance to patriarchy. What’s the Matter is the group’s third production after Mundhirikkotte and Bad Hindu.