SINGAPORE — The poetry of revered Indian poet Rabindranath Tagore comes to life in The Necessary Stage’s latest production Gitanjali [I feel the earth move]. And it all started with an idea that resident playwright Haresh Sharma had been toying around with since last year.

“Haresh said he wanted to do work with ‘his people’,” quipped artistic director Alvin Tan, pointing out that they’ve always actively collaborated with different ethnic groups and nationalities.

The Nobel Prize winner’s poetry collection Gitanjali became the starting point for the show. “The more we explored (Tagore’s) writings, the more we realised we connected with a lot of what he says. We then created a contemporary story to kind of make Tagore’s lines relatable to the present day.”

Combining theatre and dance, the piece includes various narrative threads: A dance teacher in India who is looking for a successor for her dance academy; a dancer who wants to break away from tradition and flies to Vancouver; and the dance teacher’s son who gets matchmade with an Indian woman from Singapore. It features dancers Raka Maitra and Jereh Leong, and French-Laotian choreographer-dancer Ole Khamchanla, theatre performers Ebi Shankara, Sharda Harrison and Padma Sagaram, along with sound artist Bani Haykal, singer Namita Mehta and multimedia artist Brian Gothong Tan.

The piece both breaks new ground and revisits old ones. It’s the first time the group has incorporated classical Indian dance into a production, but it also alludes to their early 1997 production Galileo [I feel the earth move], revisiting and improving upon that piece’s artistic approach.

“It was how we used the various disciplines in the early years — we used slides before, worked with another choreographer. We’ve come back to using these elements but I think the collaborative interaction of the disciplines is far more sophisticated now.”

In fact, Tan points out that Gitanjali isn’t simply an intercultural production but an interdisciplinary one. “It’s not so much focusing on or obsessing about intercultural issues because the negotiation (among cultures) is taking place as the performance (itself),” he said, pointing out how the different artistic disciplines would inspire each other on an aesthetic level. “We kind of pushed ourselves into that space a little bit more. The interdisciplinary direction here is a bit more than in any other interdisciplinary work we’ve done, like Mobile 2 or godeatgod.”

It’s been an eye-opening experience for dancer Jereh Leong, who takes on two roles in the piece. It’s the former Frontier Danceland’s first time not only collaborating with TNS, but working in theatre — and being introduced to classical Indian dance as well. “It was interesting observing how choreographer Ole worked with Alvin and seeing the kind of respect and willingness they had to take suggestions from each other. You don’t get a lot of opportunities to do collaborations in Singapore. Usually, theatre would stick to theatre and dance would stick to dance and not many are willing to venture out of their comfort zones.”

He added: “Many times in dance, it’s really about exploring movements through the body, but in theatre, expressing emotions also play a big part. Sometimes in dance, you don’t show emotions so it doesn’t distract the audience from the movement.”

For Padma Sagaram, a member of TNS’ Theatre For Seniors, playing the dance teacher didn’t really entail much dancing, barring a few hand gestures, but it did require her to brush up on her Tamil. “I have the Singaporean way of speaking Tamil, which is different from the way it’s spoken in India,” she said, adding that she had help from a young dramaturg to polish her pronunciation. She also had to watch quite a number of movies to get into her character and took inspiration from the characters, including those played by the late Indian actress Srividya.

And, of course, there’s Tagore. In the play, Sagaram has to recite his poem Silent Steps. “Reading a poem in Tamil made a lot of difference.”

Gitanjali [I feel the earth move] is from Sept 26 to 28, 8pm and 3pm, at SOTA Drama Theatre. Tickets from S$25 to S$45 at SISTIC. In English and Tamil with English subtitles.