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Magazine
PERFORMING ARTS
Cultural catalyst
RANVIR SHAH
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India’s economic boom has led to a sense of claiming our space in the world order. This confidence is fertile ground for artistic fecundity.
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Courtesy Prakriti Foundation
Moments of magic: The magnificently powerful “Dhara”
The lights dim and the rustle of clothes and slight whispers die down as the performance begins. It is a moment of great anticipation.
First evening of a new festival, The Park’s New Festival presented at Chennai with portions that will travel to Delhi and Calcutta. A year in the making, planning and finally D-day.
Intenal alchemy
As artistic director of this venture I am often asked, why I chose to do something like this. What’s in it for me? Organiser, impresario, sometimes the high-end phrase patron is also dropped, but I find that while one plays all these roles in some small measure the true role is that of a cultural catalyst. You bring in a measure of the artists, the sponsors (culture cannot survive in a non-commercial vacuum) and finally the audience.
Once you’ve brought these three elements together you hope that their internal alchemy will allow for some moments of delight, magic and a momentary glancing at the truth.
Jazz” was a bitter-sweet memoir of the Gioan jazz greats
The power and charisma that a performer of the calibre of Mallika Sarabhai holds is hard to describe. She has run the entire gamut from Bharatanatyam and Kuchupudi to Hindi and Gujarati films and finally the assignment with theatre great Peter Brook in his much publicised world tour of the Mahabharata. Having given her enough notice, she had to change the piece she planned to bring to the opening night of The Park’s New Festival as her 90-year-old mother, the grand lady of Bharatanatyam in Ahmedabad, was not well enough to travel.
Some of the pieces she wanted to bring did not fit into the theme of the festival and, after many conversations, she said, “Trust me, I’ll get something that works” and she did. “The Journey Inward: Devi Mahatmya” was a piece inspired by an Indologist’s poem to the Mother Goddess.
Ramu Ramanathan, a playwright of great skill with a fine eye for research and detail, had just written “Jazz”. It was to be a bitter-sweet memoir of the Goan Jazz greats that Hindi Cinema devoured without recognition. Here a new excavation of memory was historically happening through story telling and flash back. Live Saxophone on stage, bitter lives unfulfilled and the great, great raw love for Jazz music filled the theatre on the second evening.
“Porcelain” by Preeti Athreya was the riskiest of evenings. To work on a piece of contemporary dance with a musician who was crafting his entire soundtrack from sounds created around his father’s ceramic/porcelain work was an enormous effort. Chennai sat with bated breath. The performance was like a shot of schnapps. Intense, quick and in small portions but the memory stayed for long after.
Then “Mistaken” Annie Besant in India”. With the Vayu Naidu company from the U.K., it was a question of how the Theosophists and members of the Krishnamurti Foundation would react? Re-enacting, reviewing and rekindling history as theatre is always a tough call. Where do facts transpose the line into fiction? It was a risk worth taking as it was a story worth sharing and every story teller has the poetic license to bring his flavour to the telling.
Rekindling history with “Annie Besant in India”.
Finally the last evening with “Dhara” – Odissi and the dance of the Gotipua Traditional community. Dr.Rekha Tandon and group were and are working at the grass root levels with the creations of gurukuls and a way to sustaining the dance form for the community it comes for. Re-injecting, re-inspiring and reviving.
In a portion of the performance called “Yantra”, the mother goddess’ face is seen through the flicker of aarti flames — strong, steady, centred and magnificently powerful.
In a way that is the effect one desires as an artistic director that there will be interactions of wonder between performers and the audience, that many will go back with strong images, memories and feelings that emotions however short would have been aroused. It’s towards this sense of the intangible that we work, organise, inspire, network with sponsors and counsel the team and performers for these moments are irreplaceable and worth aspiring to.
Question of perspective
The questions that are often asked are also what is the need for showcasing a seemingly random set of dance and theatre performances. What is the coherence in the thread that binds them and, as a preview article in this paper said, so what’s new?
To paraphrase an old Broadway song — everything old is new again — it is all a question of perspective. Culture reflects and mirrors in many ways the times and context it is produced in. India is in a new and dynamically exciting phase due to its economic boom. Among various classes there is a sense of claiming our space in the world order. This confidence is fertile ground for artistic fecundity in the fields of the visual arts, literature as well as the performing arts.
No longer do we need to caveat it with our 5000-year history, instead it is us here and now and this newness is at once fresh, exciting sometimes a bit brash, not always fantastic but in a continuous churn of being created as if it were on the potter’s wheel and with every turning we are moulding, patting, turning, throwing our artistic pots, which are full of the balance of the past and its traditions but are able to carefully hinge on modernity and the colours of the contemporary as well.
The writer is director, Prakriti Foundation and the organiser of The New Festival.
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