A South Asian myth and a childhood wound collide in this intimate storytelling show
Jugal Bhinde
Location: Theater Bellevue, Klein Bellevue
- GENRE: Storytelling
- THEME: Crossing cultures, IdentiWho?, Mental Health, Recommended by Mezrab
- LANGUAGE: English
- ACCESSIBILITY: Assistance dogs welcome, Genderneutral toilets, Toilet for wheelchair users, Wheelchair accessible
info
Without Armour is a 45-minute solo storytelling performance that weaves personal memory with the myth of Karna from the Mahabharata. A queer South Asian storyteller returns to his childhood bedroom, a place filled with cartoons, video games, and the echoes of domestic violence, and places it beside the story of a mythic hero born divine but abandoned, shamed, and hardened by the world around him. Moving between a bedroom, a battlefield, and a bathhouse, the performance explores how trauma is inherited, embodied, and repeated. Through intimate storytelling, shifting physicality, light, and sound, Without Armour asks what we wear in order to survive, and what it costs to take that armour off. This is a raw, mythic, and deeply personal storytelling performance about shame, survival, queerness, and the risk of becoming visible.
Biography
Jugal Bhinde is an Amsterdam-based storyteller, performance maker, and former journalist whose work moves between memoir, mythology, reportage, and live performance. Before moving to the Netherlands, he worked as a conflict reporter in Kashmir, Jordan, and the West Bank, covering stories shaped by occupation, displacement, state violence, and structural inequality. This background continues to inform his artistic practice, which is rooted in the belief that storytelling can make visible the experiences often flattened, erased, or spoken over by dominant narratives.
Jugal’s performances are intimate, politically engaged, and formally spare. He often works with personal history, South Asian mythology, queerness, shame, violence, and belonging, asking how the forces of family, caste, class, masculinity, and migration shape the body and the self. His current solo performance, Without Armour, weaves autobiographical storytelling with the myth of Karna from the Mahabharata to examine inherited trauma and the survival strategies we mistake for identity.
Jugal performs regularly across storytelling and performance spaces in the Netherlands. His work bridges the personal and the epic, using the live encounter between performer and audience as a space for vulnerability, resistance, and transformation.