Tuning into 1 sq ft Tokhai, Nachom Arts Foundation’s work live-streamed from Imphal, is akin to stepping into the troubled private lives of people caught in the cross fires of war. Presented as a part of a day-long-digital festival of performances titled ArtAloneTogether 2, this work by Surjit Nonmeikapam is urgent and intimate. It has an intensity of focus that does not allow your attention to waver from your device screen. In the final five traumatic minutes, you find yourself gasping for breath. In those moments, you realize with a start that you, too, are another kind of homeless.

1 sq ft Tokhai draws upon the lived experiences of a displaced people torn asunder by persecution and conflict. In the choreographer’s textured imagination, the body becomes a metaphor for socio-political unrest, bearing the effects of disarticulation and loss. This piece is an unambiguous critique of Manipur’s political turmoil. It becomes a powerful articulation of the plight of refugees as they remain in a constant state of flux.

The horrors of the Second World War and its wreckage in Manipur, Surjit’s own grandmother’s stories about the Battle of Imphal, 1944, trigger this work as much as his own research into the lives of refugees does. His moving personal reflection is an overwhelmingly propulsive commentary on misery and oppression. In what is a numbing conclusion, Surjit reprises one of his props in the work, the bamboo, to overpower him completely and bring him to his knees, so to say. All is lost at that moment.

Travel Anecdotes by Kiran Kumar, another of the performances from the day-long festival, offered a fascinating interdisciplinary approach to storytelling (picture). For the artist, dancer, writer and researcher, his various interests come together to create a performance that combines history, memories, exhibition, video installation, dreams, documents, archival footage and manifestos along with his own movement aesthetics.