Fifteen minutes of fame
VIDYA SHIVRAM
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The Fringe Festival provided a rare opportunity to independent artistes to occupy centrestage.
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From a celebration of life to abstract thoughts, environmental concerns to social messages, the festival had it all
PHOTO: SHIV KUMAR PUSHPAKAR
EXPRESS YOURSELF: Anurupa Roy and Mary Gaston performing at the Fringe Festival in New Delhi.
Where would you find tap dancers, a magician who spirits away cell phones, digital art with puppetry, a stand-up comedy act, an animation film and more, under a single roof?
A tough one, but Delhi was witness to just such a motley collection under the aegis of the third 15-minute Fringe Festival held at the India Habitat Centre this past week.
Organised by the Kri Foundation and Kat Katha, the unique aspects of this festival included the cut-off time of 15 minutes for any piece (this time round, there were 17 in all). Any art form was welcome and if it was a collaborative effort, even better. It was irrelevant whether you were a student or an experienced practitioner of an art; if you had something original to say, the stage was yours.
Just what were organisers Anurupa Roy and Arshiya Sethi, along with a like-minded group of individuals seeking to address?
"There is too much slotting of the arts in people's minds. A performance has to be either dance or theatre or puppetry or music, so the in-between spaces get left out. In Fringe, the idea is to collaborate, to experiment," said Roy.
This year saw Canadian dancer Anne-Marie Gaston performing to a poem written by her ecologist-husband Tony Gaston, against a backdrop of photographs shot by the couple in India, Canada and Greece. While Gaston was invited to perform, most of the others came in after a selection process, something the organisers tried to avoid initially. "We want people to be the jury, but we had nearly 30 entries, so we had to narrow them down."
For many of these artistes, a 15-minute performance at the Fringe was a litmus test to decide whether they should flesh out their ideas to a full performance.
Those who performed once have come back again. Like Swapan Majumdar, a dancer with Shri Ram Bharatiya Kala Kendra, who presented a piece in Contemporary Dance called `Journey' "It gave me a chance to debut as a solo performer and express myself creatively. Following my debut, I got a few more offers for solo shows," said Majumdar.
Just as there are no barriers in the art performed, there were no limits for the subjects either. From a celebration of life to abstract thoughts, environmental concerns and social messages, the two-day event saw a mix of content.
Puppeteer Varun Narain, for instance, came up with his new production `Latex Bhujiya' where he tackled issues like alternate sexuality and contraception.
For him being at the Fringe was a way of giving back to the community what he had gathered over the last few years. It was also about meeting people "who are unafraid to experiment with their ideas and about crossing boundaries in art."
In its third year, Fringes acquired a logo. Not to mention a loyalty factor. This is not to say that all that was put up made the grade. Some mediocrity found its way in, but the organisers were not too worried. That the annual festival happened was reason enough to cheer.
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