"Be careful!" can be a caring instruction, a suggestion, or even an order - depending on who gives it. Whatever it is, being careful and staying cautious is an everyday lived experience for women.
Be Careful is an incisive satire that challenges the warped status quo and the notion of safety. The work is rooted in rage about violence women suffer. It addresses the all-too-familiar trope that by simply dressing in a certain way women can avoid becoming victims of crime.
Stripping down a culture hiding behind its ignorant, prudish mores, Mallika Taneja exposes the contradictions of India’s stagnated social progress. Although rooted in a particular context, Be Careful resonates with audiences all over the world, pointing towards the global epidemic of victim blaming and violence against women.
12 years after its first performances, Taneja continues to perform the show, in a world where the words ‘Be Careful’ and’ being ‘safe’ have taken on newer and seemingly more urgent meanings.
In co-operation with & – Espoo Theatre.
Mallika Taneja lives and works out of New Delhi, India. Through performances, installations, and curatorial work, she explores questions of gender, solidarity, pleasure, rest, and remembering. She is particularly interested in exploring political possibilities of performative ensembles and the role songs have to play in leaving and gathering traces of people, places, and things.
Some of her works and collaborative spaces include Be Careful, Allegedly, Rest of the Struggle, Zanana ka Zamana, and Sex Chat Room. She won the ZKB Acknowledgement Prize for ‘Be Careful‘ in 2015, the ZKB Patronage Prize for ‘Allegedly‘ in 2021, and the Mahindra Excellence in Theatre Award for ‘Do You Know This Song?’ in 2024.
Taneja initiated Women Walk at Midnight, a practice of women walking at night time in their cities, in 2016 and has since then been leading the Delhi chapter. She has initiated and incubated several walks and chapters of the practice globally.
Production and Subtitling: Drishti Chawla
This piece was first made at the Tadpole Repertory as part of their show NDLS.