Living Smile Vidya I Introducing Living Smile Vidya

Living Smile Vidya is a transgender actress, author and activist from India, who sought asylum in Switzerland in 2018. Her poignant yet comical one-woman-show bears her name and features her own story: that of a trans Dalit woman, an artist in exile, and a fighter for the right to exist freely and with dignity. In India, she expected no national recognition or miracles. She simply wanted to live without being crushed. In Switzerland, she sought to free herself from another kind of invisibility: life in refugee centres, and the intrusive questions and constant need to justify her existence that come with it. Finding her own apartment became an act of independence – almost a luxury. She dances, sings and projects her story and struggles on stage in this moving yet challenging show, exposing her unique and powerful soul.
* Still sometimes referred to by the insulting term ‘untouchables’, dalits - ‘the oppressed’ in Sanskrit - are destined from birth to a life of discrimination, the UN reminds us.