Without Armour Jugal Bhinde

Without Armour is a 45-minute solo performance in which personal memories are interwoven with the myth of Karna from the Mahabharata. The story

A queer South Asian narrator returns to his childhood bedroom, a place filled with cartoons, video games, and the echoes of domestic violence, and juxtaposes these with the story of a mythical hero who was born divine but subsequently abandoned, shamed, and hardened by the world around him.

The performance takes place in a bedroom, on a battlefield, and in a bathhouse, and explores how trauma is inherited, embodied, and repeated. Through intimate stories, shifting physicality, light, and sound, Without Armour asks what we wear to survive, and what it costs to shed that armor. This is a raw, mythical, and deeply personal storytelling performance about shame, survival, being queer, and the risk of becoming visible.