“Dance theatre is literally a mingling of dance, theatre and story telling, in the form of a sutradhar, here a spinning dervish,” says Sarabhai. There is very little that the Parsis have, in dance forms so to speak, so the danseuse incorporated Middle Eastern influences in her work.

Recreation of the past remains largely incomplete without costumes and Sarabhai saw to it, that And Then They...turned out to be closest to the historic reality. “The costumes were created after intensive research, from Persian paintings and books on Zoroastrianism that I got from my Parsi friends,” says Sarabhai. The performance that will be touring 18 cities, which comes in a 45-minute package, has music scored by Jaya Nair, Darpana Musicians and Eero Hameenniemi and will also feature Sarabhai’s daughter Anahita Sarabhai.

Condensing a cultural history into a 45-minute performance couldn’t have been easy. The task was daunting and the Persian history has stories that could ‘last several nights’, but Sarabhai wanted colour in her creation. “I chose things that were fun to enact and could be beautifully visualised and realised. Of course, I did have to dramatise the very important bits of history also,” says the danseuse.

Parsi history, like most others, is dramatic and eventful. It’s just that it is neither talked about extensively, nor featured regularly in creative endeavours. This made Dr Villoo Morawala Patell, founder of Avesthagen Limited, a life sciences corporation, throw his weight behind Sarabhai’s creation. “The way Mallika conceptualises and retells stories we might have heard hundred times over is fascinating,” says Patell.