Fearless Nadia
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Fearless Nadia

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“We should really know about her because she is an amazing,” says Ben Walsh. “She was an Australian-born white woman in the early days of Hindi cinema, before it was called Bollywood, and she did all of her own stunts, that’s what she was legend for and why she got the name Fearless Nadia. She jumped from horses, swung on rope from balcony to balcony, picked up grown men above her head and threw them down,” explains Walsh.


 Walsh was given his own “crash course” in her history when he travelled to India to meet with her grandson, Roy Wadia, after being commissioned to create a new work based on one of her films. With her descendants, he watched several of her films and although she is most remembered for her lead role – one of the first females to do such a thing in Indian films – in the film Hunterwali, Walsh chose Diamond Queen as his inspiration. 

Composer and percussionist Walsh, who plays with his Orkestra of the Underground, has created the stage show Fearless Nadia, which combines an edited version of the film, live music, dance and stunts, which will be performed at the Melbourne Recital Centre for one night only as part of the Melbourne Festival this Sunday.

Diamond Queen, explains Walsh from Sydney, was one of the first talkies, but coming in at over two hours long, needed to be edited down. “Before I could compose or direct anything I had to watch this really long old film made in 1939 and recut it for a YouTube generation. Imagine if someone said ‘give me Star Wars but give it to me in 30 minutes and try and get all the characters in it and all the best moments’ – it’s really hard,” he says. That was the least of his problems, however. The age of the old nitrate film itself meant dialogue was difficult to hear and then there was the language itself. “It was all in this old-style of Hindi that modern day Indians don’t really speak,” he says, meaning even when the translator could hear it, he couldn’t understand it. “So we had to get a few people to have a crack at it,” he says of the process that took six months to complete.

 “Once I did the edit I had all the scenes and I composed to each scene,” says Walsh, who has previously composed a full orchestral score to Oscar winning Shaun Tan’s The Arrival, and was most recently nominated for a Helpmann Award for the score of Legs on the Wall’s production, My Bicycle Loves You. “There’s 40 pieces of music in the whole thing so it’s like a small symphony and I had to bleed the world of Indian classical music with western notation and western classical forms so that was another whole cultural leap that I had to weave together two very different musical worlds,” he says. Joining him on stage for Fearless Nadia are special guests Aneesh Pradhan, Sangeet Mishra, Sudhir Nayak and Sanjeev Shankar and together with members of the Orkestra of the Underground, they will be playing a multi-cultural mix of instruments: tabla, shenai, sarangi and dholak alongside trumpet, violin and clarinet, with Walsh himself conducting the lot from his drum kit. Dancer Shruti Ghosh also performs, integrating several art forms to create the one show. 

“There’s a great scene where Nadia and the hero, who she is pretty besotted with, both escape being pummelled by bad guys by jumping off this huge waterfall. As they jump up into the air and get swirled around in the waters of the rapids, our viola player takes flight and his silhouette in front of the screen is somersaulting and it’s a great moment where the music and the film come together,” explains Walsh. “So we try and make it feel like the film makes its way onto the stage, it’s just not sitting there watching a movie. It’s very much alive.”

BY JOANNE BROOKFIELD