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Serendipity Arts Festival 2024: A future-forward event that is rooted in Goa
Summary
The upcoming edition of the Serendipity Arts Festival explores the role of culture in helping society negotiate complex issues and uncertain futures
Culture as a tool to shape the future—that is the premise underlying the ninth edition of the Serendipity Arts Festival, all set to take place in Panjim, Goa. The various workshops, performances, conversations and exhibitions—spanning music, dance, theatre, food, craft and visual arts—are looking at our relationship with the body, time, space, community, ecology, and more. As one pores over the lineup of events and dialogues, there is an introspective feel to this annual interdisciplinary. “In the face of the uncertainties that we are facing as a society, a cultural festival such as this brings us together as a community, shows ways of coexisting, and makes us resilient," says Smriti Rajgarhia, director of the festival and the Serendipity Arts Foundation that helms it.
The idea is to look at creative solutions for new problems. “Liberal arts need to be part of everyone’s lives. In the modern day and age, when everything is about control, culture gives you tools on how that control can be negotiated," she adds.
This edition sees some of the curators from past editions return to the festival such as Quasar Thakore Padamsee for theatre and Geeta Chandran for dance, while some of the newer ones such as the collective, Edible Issues—run by Anusha Murthy and Elizabeth Yorke—are adding a new dimension to the dialogue around the culinary arts. There is a greater focus on accessibility with writer-disability campaigner Salil Chaturvedi curating projects such as Blind Date with Friends about overcoming barriers to access—both physical and social.
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The fact that each year, the festival takes place across different buildings—some which have remained constant over time, and others that are granted access to by the state government each year—, adds a certain serendipity to the nature of the festival itself. This offers a space for experimentation and incubation of new ideas. “As a result some important conversations emerge. For instance, with technology becoming an important part of creation, the focus often shifts to the object and not the person making things. In such a scenario, how does the community become a co-creator of art?" asks Rajgarhia.
An important project in this regard, curated by the Delhi-based artist duo, Jiten Thukral and Sumir Tagra, is the Traveling Balcaos. Conceptualised by the Social Design Collaborative, itinerant balcaos—or traditional porches in homes, which serve as spaces for conversation—are coming up across Panjim at the moment. Residents of the city are responding to these public installations in their own way. During the festival, these travelling structures will park themselves at the entrance of the Art Park, thus asserting the role of community and identity in a rapidly changing Goa.
Body in time and space
Jayachandran Palazhy, founder and artistic director of Attakkalari Centre for Movement Arts, has co-curated the dance segment for the festival. With technology emerging as a tool of control, he is looking at the body as the final frontier in the way we experience the world—how it remains the sole medium for independent thought and expression. Palazhy has also looked at the relationship between the body, time and space in his curation, and ways in which artists can animate those spaces and reimagine them through different imagery and metaphors.
Once he formulated the idea, an open call was sent, which received nearly 87 entries. Of these six choreographers were chosen to create work as part of the theme, Folios of Time. They were mentored at the Attakkalari studios in Bengaluru by Italian artist-choreographer Damiano Ottavio Bigi and dramaturg Alessandra Paoletti. They also engaged with Japanese digital artist Kunihiko Matsuo. At the festival, two performances will take place under Folios of Time—almost like two chapters of a single book—featuring work by three choreographers each.
It is not just emerging voices in contemporary dance, but leading practitioners such as Ottavio Bigi, who will also showcase their works in That’s All Folks, which is the second part of a trilogy combining dance, science and myth. It is inspired by the concept of an event horizon, an imaginary boundary beyond which one cannot see. “It is a visually beautiful and technically demanding piece. The Indian audience and artists should be introduced to these kinds of articulations of visual space, design and sonic spaces as well," says Palazhy. Another important work is Deus Nos Acudi by African choreographer Pak Ndjamena.
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The conversation around the body and its relationship to various physical, social and cultural constructs continues with Allegories of Anatomy: A Triple Bill, which brings together three artists from New Delhi, Arunachal Pradesh and Seoul. “Then there is Sonnet of Samsara, a collaboration with Attakkalari and UK-based Kinetika, that looks at connections between myth, experience and dream. Though each of these comes from the same source, it belongs to a different timescape," he adds. The sonic scape of the performance is interesting, with drums from ancient musical of traditions of Kerala being used alongside the deva vadyam, which was earlier played outside the sanctum sanctorum during temple rituals in the state. Four different kinds of drums from Tamil Nadu such as the thavil are also a part of the Sonnet of Samsara, giving the performance a touch of a spiritual musical procession. For the performance, Kinetika has created flags of sorts painted on Murshidabad silk. “The images on the 50 hand painted flags hail from experiences of different communities in today’s world. We animate them through our dance and processional movement. The treatment seems ritualistic, wherein we are invoking something from our inner spaces," elaborates Palazhy.
Reflecting the times we live in
Just like for dance, theatre curators, Quasar Thakore Padamsee and Sankar Venkateswaran too sent out an open call for new works earlier this year to truly understand what theatre practitioners were responding to and how. “When Sankar and I talked about the kind of festival we wanted to build this year, we were clear that it should not come solely from our phone books. Serendipity is now an important festival not just on the art calendar but for the theatre fraternity as well, and hence should reflect on what is happening around us. We wanted to move out of what we knew and were limited by," explains Thakore Padamsee, artistic director of the theatre and arts management company QTP. Little did they know that they would be inundated with hundreds of entries, and they ended up sifting through all of those in July-August.
As a result, the theatre segment at the festival has a mix of new commissioned work and existing productions that they discovered through this call. “We would never have come across works such as Buried Treasure otherwise," he adds. The programming features both the classical and the new-age. So, if there is a production of Sakuntalam in Kutiyattam and the ritualistic performance of Mudiyetta, there is also the Shahi Tukra, which explores tenderness, caregiving and sacrifice in an intimate session. It takes place for only one audience member at a time and is completely visceral about feeling textures and smelling aromas.
Then there is the House Blue, which is a narrative collaborative performance, which falls at the intersection of storytelling and theatre. The work is rooted in a series of images by documentary photographer-filmmaker Mrityunjay, of a government quarter taken on the last day of its occupancy by his family. It explores whether home is an idea or a physical space that one inhabits. “The visitor will see something like Beloved [about gender issues] in a conventional presentation space, but then also wander into an exhibition space to find this one man telling a story in House Blue accompanied by music and projections. Those are the ideas that we want to push," adds Thakore Padamsee.
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There is also Relief Camp, perhaps one of the most sociopolitically relevant works to emerge in recent times, by Kalakshetra Manipur. At a time when the state is struggling with ethnic conflict, the performing arts collective looks at the role that theatre must assume at this point. Through a psychophysical theatre process, the performance looks to highlight the traumatic experiences of people living in relief camps. “These are important topics—not in the sense that they are heavy weighted subjects—but things that people are thinking about. When you see the theatre section in the festival, you will get a good idea of where we are at," he says.
Music as a wakeup call
Another set of artists from Manipur at the festival include Imphal Talkies, a folk rock band, known for its political songs that represent the minority communities in India. “Artists suffer the most as a result of a conflict. Through performances by Imphal Talkies—which opens the festival—and collaborations such as One World, we are talking about the role of music not just in soothing souls but as means to wake people up to important truths," says Zubin Balaporia, Mumbai-based musician, who has for 30 years performed and toured with the band Indus Creed, and has co-curated the music segment at Serendipity. He has known Akhu Chingangbam, who helms Imphal Talkies, for years now, and reconnected with him earlier this year when they collaborated on a Manipuri film.
“The concept of One World came to me while discussing with my co-bandmate, Uday Benegal, the idea of a concert which was also a peace initiative," elaborates Balaporia. The eventual concert at Serendipity, hopes to transcend cultural divides, and brings together 17 songs of peace and anti-war by Lou Majaw, Warren Mendosa and Pratika Gopinath. “It may sound simplistic, but it has been tried and tested in the past—that if people from different nationalities play music together, there can never be any fighting," he adds.
The festival has always tried to be rooted in the cultural ethos of Goa, and the musical segment this year is no different. Last year Balaporia had performed on the opening night with Ustad Zakir Hussain and Ranjit Barot. The lineup also featured a Fado—a melancholic musical form, which originated in Portugal and was practiced in the olden days in Goa— by Nadia Rebelo. This year, Balaporia decided to take the Fado performance a notch further, by making it a little more contemporary. “Fado is beautiful when performed in the original form. But how do we take it to the younger audience? There has to be some sort of evolution without destroying the essence of it. In Sempre Fado: Antigo e Novo, we have paired vocals by Nadia with a string quartet and keyboards," explains Balaporia.
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Another performance, which transcends divides of a different kind is by the young vocalists from the Mumbai-based Happy Home School for the Blind. Balaporia has worked with the various students from the school for over 17 years. At the festival, the choir will be backed by pianist Nitesh Sonawane, who is also visually impaired. “He comes from a middle class Maharashtrian family but has this connection with jazz music. We enrolled him at the True School of Music and he has really blossomed. This will be followed by a conversation with Nitesh about his practice and the way he has mapped out his keyboard," he adds.
The future of food
Edible Issues, helmed by Elizabeth Yorke and Anusha Murthy, has been fostering thought and conversation on the Indian food system since 2018. At the FoodLab at Serendipity this year takes this forward and looks at how culture, climate, and identity shape the choices we make—from the field to the kitchen. The duo want to use the idea of the future of food as a tool to get people to think about choice. “Is this the food future we want or desire? If not, what do we need to change? Culture plays a huge role in shaping these choices. Hence our curation looks at three broad ideas," explains Yorke.
One is the idea of climate as culture, in which visitors explore the local biodiversity and how our cultural relationship with food influences choices. “We do that in projects such as Nectar, a project which gets participants to mimic the role of bees. There are sessions on seaweed and a tide pool walk to go into the ocean and see the role it plays as a climate commodity," she adds. Then, there is a workshop on insects, our cultural relationship with them and the role they could play in food security and in the context of climate change.
The next big theme is ‘people as cultures’, in which the various experts look at how migration, community and society can determine food futures. So, the lineup includes culinary researcher Shubhra Chatterji’s workshop on performance, body and food. “It is a theoretical technique and approach towards exploring our deepest relationship with food. Then there is Sri Vamsi Matta’s performance, Come Eat with Me, in which the relationship between caste and food is discussed over a meal," says Yorke. Researcher-artist Sreejata Roy’s workshop, Crisis Cuisine, explores the idea of future food in times of crisis such as covid-19 and climate change-related catastrophes. The third theme looks at the tools for our future, which can act as bridges between traditions and transitions. “These come through in workshops on design and recipe creation, such as Priya Mani’s visual encyclopedia of Indian food. Can we use climate recipes as a tool to capture our current narratives or be hopeful of what future recipes could look like? We are helping people think about choice in different manners," she adds.
Through such conversations, the festival does not just consider new ideas in art and culture, but also the fresh ways in which we need to navigate the uncertain futures that lie before us.
The festival will take place across venues in Panjim, Goa, between 15-22 December.
