THE MONK & THE WARRIOR

Premiered in April 2026 at the National Centre of Performing Arts (NCPA) in Mumbai, India, The Monk & The Warrior is a cross-cultural epic written by acclaimed Indian playwright Mahesh Dattani (Sahitya Akademi Award), conceived & directed by Jonathan Taikina Taylor of The SuperGeographics (USA), and with music composition by Eero Hämeenniemi (Finland). A love story spanning space, time, and culture, audiences follow Bodhisattva and Alexander through a surreal journey which weaves Indian and Western queer histories. The play traces the conflict between ambition and transcendence, opening with the historically accurate encounter of Alexander the Great and a Bodhisattva monk, and the dream of a relationship that follows. Classic tales—from the Monkey and the Crocodile, Chandravati and Malavati, Shams and Rumi, to the goddesses Fortuna and Jyotish—are revisited through a queer lens to weigh the cost of loving across cultures. With a fierce mix of curiosity and desire, they navigate a magnificent tapestry of stories that redefine what it means to accept and understand one another.

By hypothesizing queerness and colonization as opposites the play reimagines this meeting of India with colonial power through curiosity, plurality, and equality. Their ensuing relationship is uniquely queer, reframing familiar folk tales and mythologies through a new perspective and asking, ‘Can queerness offer an antidote to oppressive political power?’ This type of reframed storytelling is a vital building block in the ongoing construction of our global interrelationships which uplift diversity and a multiplicity of culture.

We have built the play through a series of cross-cultural collaborative workshops between 2020 and 2025. One artist creates something within their practice, they then hand it off to another to be transformed within theirs. The objects of the play multiply through their circulation between artists, across time, space and culture, colliding in the rehearsal room to make something completely unique. In this larger political moment, non-hierarchical methodologies and agreements as ways of making art and, by extension, of building community are incredibly important to research and create in cross-cultural context. This play, process, and work group seeks to unravel these inherited hierarchies based on old systems and hard power to offer new paths towards cross-cultural collaboration.