Be Careful Lab

The Be Careful Lab is an invitation to artists to enter a space of play, risk, and questioning at the intersections of city, gender, and performance.

Conceived and facilitated by theatre artist Mallika Taneja, the Lab extends questions from her works Thoda Dhyaan Se (Be Careful) and the long-term practice Women Walk at Midnight. It asks what happens when different bodies stand on stage and in the streets — how these presences shift the gaze, unsettle expectations, and reframe who is watching and who is being watched.

The Lab explores how performance on stage and performance in public space can be layered, stripped, and re-imagined. It asks: what shifts when the identity of the body changes? How do race, gender, orientation, disability, caste, class, religion, nationality, and geography redefine what it means to say Thoda Dhyaan Se (Be Careful)?

Rather than simply underlining differences of identity within feminist performative practice, the Lab seeks moments of intersection and solidarity. It opens up deeper — and often more difficult — conversations around safety, victim-blaming, risk, and collective endurance.

At its core, the Be Careful Lab is a collective search for answers, refusals, and resonances. It creates a space to think through feminist performance practice not as a fixed form but as a living, shifting encounter between bodies, gazes, and cities.

The Lab is conceived as a traveling practice, adaptable to different contexts and cities, where local dynamics and realities shape the questions that are asked — and the solidarities that can be found.

The first Lab was conducted in New Delhi in April 2025 as part of the Empowerment exhibition by the Goethe-Institut Max Mueller Bhawan, New Delhi.