Aunty Moxie is Delulu Comes to Bengaluru This Week

With the philosophy of sustainability influencing fashion, food, architecture, and well, everyday living, why not the arts? This is exactly the ideology that pushed Rebecca Spurgeon and Ananth Menon to kickstart Okapi. “In each of our 20 odd years in the creative industry in Bengaluru, we have reckoned with the questions of sustaining a creative practice and funding even as performance spaces and institutions have come and gone,” says Rebecca, adding how sustaining the Arts is synonymous with creating strategies, interventions and infrastructure “that allows artists to continue working and for this work to reach audiences”.

A still from Aunty Moxie is Delulu
| Photo Credit:
Special Arrangement

In 2025, Okapi is in its soft launch year. “Okapi’s hard launch is set for June 2026, and as a part of its soft launch year, we have produced concerts including Oorga featuring Bindhumalini Naraswamy, Vedanth Bharadwaj and Ananth Menon, and are currently co-curating concerts for World Trade Centre with Indian Music Experience, and producing our play, Aunty Moxie is Delulu.” The latter follows the story of Aunty Moxie, a 60-year-old woman living a dilapidated life in a bustling city. Her hopeless paradigm is set against conflicts that Ganga, the goddess of forgiveness, and Nemesis, the Greek goddess of revenge, face.

A still from Aunty Moxie is Delulu
| Photo Credit:
Special Arrangement

This play now comes to Bengaluru this week, with performances scheduled in Mumbai and New Delhi next respectively. Its writer, director and actor Ashiqa Salvan explains how the idea for Aunty Moxie is Delulu came about. “The thought about that sour feeling and taste in the mouth of ‘being wronged’ comes from daily interactions with loved ones and even those I don’t love very much.”

It comes from world news on social media and on broadcasted/mass media, Ashiqa says. “It comes from observing interactions on the streets whether it be between stray animals and humans or humans with one another.”

All beings seem to have an inert sense that they have been wronged which in turn influences them in their dealings with life henceforth, Ashiqa says. “Most times this sour feeling can’t be logically traced back to its original reason. But the feeling and taste exists nonetheless thus creating an unstoppable continuum.”  

A still from Aunty Moxie is Delulu
| Photo Credit:
Special Arrangement

This play, she adds, was developed in residency on campus at Adishakti Laboratory for Theatre Art Research in Puducherry as part of their Theatriculate Fellowship programme. Within the fractured narrative of the play, Ashiqa says, are intertwined imagined personal stories and moorings of Nemesis, Ganga and Moxie trying to bring to light that all beings experience the same pain, sour unfairness, and helplessness.

“Moxie is a character completely imagined and created using my real life experiences, so plotting her narrative had fewer rules and boundaries. What was also enjoyable was finding quirks of these characters on the floor that don’t necessarily sit with our already formed perception of their personalities and duties,” says Ashiqa. 

On September 5 at Jagriti Theatre, Varthur Main Road, Whitefield. At 7.30 pm. Tickets on in.bookmyshow.com