10 years of Serendipity Arts Festival: Blurring the lines between genres

Another performance in 2023 that compelled similar questions was Kahaniyon ka Manthan, which took place within the Old GMC Complex. This storytelling project, curated by Mayuri Upadhya, brought together the Rajasthani kavad katha with Mohiniyattam from Kerala. Theatre practitioner Akhshay Gandhi and dancer-choreographer Divya Warier brought to life metaphorical stories around the seven manthans, or churnings— including emotional, social and philosophical— about what it means to be human. Kahaniyon ka Manthan also tried to break the boundaries between classical and folk, traditional and contemporary.

It is such multi-disciplinarity that has informed the curation of each edition of the Serendipity Arts Festival, with music, dance, theatre, food, craft, technology and visual arts engaging in dialogue with one another. Over the years, the audience too has embraced the programming, unfettered by the baggage of genre and definition. In the first edition in 2016, the showcases were met with curiosity. Take Talatum, in which director Abhilash Pillai conducted a theatre experiment with Theyyam, magic and acrobatics coming together with puppeteers and contemporary theatre practitioners. This interpretation of William Shakespeare’s The Tempest came across as a novelty. Over the years, visitors have expanded their view of the forms that art can take—parking lots have turned into backdrops to performances, the dining table has become a vehicle to explore memory, caregiving and identity, and the barge moving over the Mandovi becomes a vehicle for the confluence of different musical traditions.

The 10th edition of Serendipity, to be held in Panaji from 12-21 December, takes forward synergies with an expanded lineup of over 35 curators across disciplines. The curators include Lillete Dubey, Geeta Chandran, Zubin Balaporia, Anjana Somany, Chef Manu Chandra, Ranjit Hoskote, Chef Thomas Zacharias and The Locavore and Rahaab Allana. Smriti Rajgarhia, director, Serendipity Arts Foundation and Festival, hopes this lineup will catalyse new ideas, questions and connections that continue to energise the arts in South Asia.

It is important to view Serendipity within the larger arts landscape. The last five years have seen the arts ecosystem in India widen with an increase in festivals, concerts, museums and institutional activity. Existing and new festivals have become more welcoming of cross-pollination. Cultural organisations and policymakers too are taking the collaborative approach. According to Sanjoy K. Roy, managing director, Teamwork Arts, artists are moving between forms with greater confidence, and audiences are increasingly receptive to experiences that blur boundaries. Jaya Asokan, fair director, India Art Fair, feels that interdisciplinarity is no longer a fringe tendency but is now at the centre of contemporary practice in south Asia. “We’ve built our programming around this expanded vocabulary, be it the talks programme, arts tour or the design section, where artists and designers collaborate across material, concept and craft," she says.

Asokan cites the example of Rajyashri Goody, who brings together food, caste histories, papier-mâché, ceramics and performance to build powerful narratives of assertion and resistance. Multimedia artist Afrah Shafiq’s research-driven practice moves between literature, gaming, digital interfaces and gendered archives, while Shailesh BR works at the intersection of art, mechanics and logical reasoning with collaborations that extend all the way to scientists at CERN. Richa Agarwal of Kolkata Centre for Creativity too lists similar examples of cross-pollination—Nazes Afroz’s photography exhibition Atlas of Serenities: Chronicles of Little Intimacies, which explored migration, memory, and lived history. It showed how journalism and art can collide to start meaningful dialogue; or Baithakkhana, also held earlier this year, which became a celebration of Bengali culture across literature, theatre, music, and film.

Dancer Geeta Chandran, who is curating a segment at Serendipity for the fourth year, says the silos within which the arts had been functioning until recently are colonial constructs. “Our traditions were never bound by silos. The Natyashastra drew from poetry, theatre and music," she says. “It was during the 19th-20th centuries that we moved away from this inherent multi-disciplinarity to a more colonial categorisation of the arts, in which every form needed to be viewed separately."

Serendipity was significant for returning to this ethos but within a contemporary context, and at a time when this kind of cross-pollination was not part of the mainstream cultural consciousness. It also situated the festival away from the conventional art hubs, and took it to Goa. Chandran, who has been associated with the arts for four decades, is excited by the blank slate that curators like her get to test new ideas. “The conversations start months in advance—unlike many other festivals—so that the artists also get time to respond to the spaces and concepts. The preparation is important. Some of the artists have never been exposed to a concept such as this. It becomes my responsibility as a curator to offer time, patience and room for dialogue," she says. The festival thus becomes a three-way interaction between the curator, artist and audience.

Hema Singh Rance, director-arts, India, British Council, too says that Serendipity’s commissioning of new works provides artists with the time, resources and freedom to explore forms, processes and collaborations. “Such commissions reinforce the festival’s role as a generator of new cultural production rather than merely a showcase. Importantly, festivals like Serendipity signal that interdisciplinary engagement is becoming a mindset rather than just a curatorial choice."

2025 EDITION: A SNAPSHOT

How does the milestone of the 10th edition carry forth this “polylogue" between ideas and energies? Take Clay Play, curated by Aneesh Pradhan and Shubha Mudgal, which celebrates percussion instruments made from clay while spotlighting local processional practices. To be presented this year, it focuses on Goan folk instruments such as the samel, ghum, dhol, tasha and zhanj, while evoking the jagor tradition, where processions travel from place to place accompanied by music.

Then there’s Handle with Care by the Belgian performance group, Ontroerend Goed, which pares theatre down to its bones with no performers, technicians or crew. A sealed box is placed at the centre of the stage, with a member of the audience opening it and following the instructions. “This experimental performance aims to ask a simple question: can a group of strangers create something meaningful, together, in the here and now?" states the curatorial note.

One of the highlights of the dance segment is Bhagavathy, which deconstructs the ideas of devotion, gendered power and the dualities that women are forced to suppress. There is Ramman, a ritual masked dance from Uttarakhand, which dates back hundreds of years and is coming out of the Himalayan villages for the first time.

Theatre director Anuradha Kapur’s curation combines myth, the nature of memory and ideas from philosophy in Deepan Sivaraman’s The Legends of Khasak, based on O.V. Vijayan’s novel, which traces the journey of a young man stumbling upon a remote village in Kerala. The 180-year-old legacy of Marathi theatre is revisited in Gosht Sanyukta Manapmanachi, which delves into the stories of two artists, Sangeetsurya Keshavrao Bhosle and Balagandharva, who performed a play to raise funds for the Tilak Swarajya Fund during the independence movement. There is Ustad, a musical tribute to the late Zakir Hussain, curated by his longtime collaborators Zubin Balaporia and Ranjit Barot. The performances span jazz and fusion to Indian classical and contemporary improvisation.

Several artists and curators return to the festival this year, but in a different form and style. Goa-based Assavri Kulkarni has been part of the festival both as a photographer and a heritage food chef. In the first edition, she had created a photobook each day on a topic related to Panaji—from an obscure farmers market to the oldest typewriter shop in Goa. Two years ago, she held a workshop related to the heritage and tribal food of the state, where she would cook a dish made with traditional tubers each day. Curious visitors would throng her workstation as she made breads, halwas and pickles. Last year, the festival showed a short film on her documentary project, Recipes of the River. The time around, Kulkarni is back in her photographer avatar in a group show, curated by Dinesh Khanna, titled Feeling Home. Where is Home? She is one of the five photographers who respond to the idea of home, “whether grounded in present reality or shaped by historical absence, inherited memory or experience".

Veerangana Solanki too returns to curate of one of the visual arts segments. Her association with the festival started in 2020, when the pandemic compelled Serendipity to the virtual space. Then, she had conceptualised two iterations of Future Landings, featuring five artists each, whose works drew on image archives and fictional narratives on the nature of time. Once the festival returned to Goa in a physical form in 2022, a new form of Future Landings was shown with works by the 10 artists.

Last year, Solanki invited 15 artists including Alan Rego, Non-linear, Noni-Mouse, Reetu Sattar, Sanaya Ardeshir and Sarah Bahr to explore touch synaesthetically with sound and memory in A Haptic Score. The curation was an extension of Solanki's interest in creating a map of feelings that “constantly look and listen synaesthetically. With the senses as unscripted arrival and departure points, touch becomes the singular sense that seeps into every synaesthetic compilation. Every sense and void is animated with a marker that is touched by an absence or a presence."

For the 10th edition, she is curating Barge, which features strands from her past curations. Parked at the Captain of Ports Jetty in Old Goa, Barge is a series of site-specific interventions that will become a space for sensory discovery. “I approach the curation with the question: How can the audience take away a memory in a field of imagination sparked by absence and presence?" says Solanki. “Over time, I have been working with sound and synaesthesia as a visual form. It is integral to the experience."

Another curator who has expanded on last year’s thoughts is writer and disability campaigner Salil Chaturvedi, who came on board as an access curator in 2024. His association with the festival goes back to 2022, and last year, he introduced Blind Date with Friends, where able-bodied visitors paired up with visually impaired persons to experience the festival. Like last year, there will be ISL Jam, where a group of deaf performers will demonstrate poems in Indian sign language (ISL) and Visual Vernacular (VV).

Chaturvedi is curating a show called Therefore I Am, which brings together seven artists with disabilities from Ladakh, Nagpur, Bhopal, Berkeley, Delhi and Bengaluru, who work in diverse media ranging from video art and painting to sculpture. Blind Date with Friends has been expanded to include people with other disabilities. Another initiative in this edition is blind birding. “When you go bird watching, you are often hearing the bird and not seeing it. The Goa Conservation Network is hosting sessions where you experience birds through sounds," he says.

Since the festival is all about serendipitous encounters, Chaturvedi designed Poems on the Move last year with artist duo Thukral & Tagra. It had been a long-standing wish of his to plaster Goa’s urbanscape with poetry. So, the three of them decided to do the next best thing—which was to bring urban poetry to public transport. This year again, visitors taking shuttles between venues might just find a poet sitting next to them, or hear a reading of verses in Hindi, English, Konkani or Punjabi, turning a mundane space into a backdrop to poetic encounters.

Curator Sankar Venkateswaran is offering a new take on existing traditions. Venkateswaran has showcased Mrcchakatikam in Kutiyattam, which has its roots in the Brahminical rituals. The production, adapted and directed by G. Venu, is secularised, with a heroine at the centre of the story. “Here, a woman is the priest in ritualistic practices, which has traditionally been seen as the realm of men. It is a play about the common people and not about deities, which makes it timely," says Venkateswaran.

Diametrically opposite to this in treatment is Bob Marley from Kodihalli, directed by Lakshman K.P., a contemporary theatre practitioner invested in social justice movements. This play about caste centres around three people living in Bengaluru, who conceal their identities and hide what they eat. One day, after having a meal of meat, they offer a bone to a dog, who takes it to the house of a dominant caste landlord. They are given a few hours to move out. The play is set on this last night together when they reflect on their move from the village to the city, and the production functions as combination of biography and social commentary.

Between the two polarities of curation lies the Puppet Folk Arts Lab, developed with puppet theatre artist Anurupa Roy of Katkatha. “She in turn has worked with four other puppet artists. Folk art doesn’t feature in urban festivals unless it is tagged as folk art. Anurupa has been nurturing folk artists to go beyond that definition," Venkateswaran says. The artists and curators respond in different ways to the thought of combining different art disciplines. Thomas Zacharias, founder of The Locavore, first curated a workshop at Serendipity in 2019 when he was still at The Bombay Canteen in Mumbai. In 2023, Zacharias returned to the festival as a culinary arts curator. From showcasing films around millets to archiving community-based food systems, his approach incorporates diverse voices and themes in India’s food systems.

This time, Zacharias and The Locavore bring a “multisensory installation" called What Does Loss Taste Like? It has been created in collaboration with Immerse and Quasar Thakore-Padamsee to explore the slow disappearance of culinary traditions and biodiversity. Thomas’ experiences, gleaned from travels across the country, meet those of immersive designers, light and sound artists, and theatre practitioners shaping the installation. “The set designer, Avyakta Kapur, for instance, is witnessing these shifts at her own farm in Himachal Pradesh. We’re all seeing climatic changes unfurl at an alarming pace. So the visual brief for the installation became Black Mirror meets Indian food in the year 2100," says Zacharias. Set in the distant future, the experience unfolds across a series of immersive chambers—sterile, regulated, and datadriven—where diversity of taste has been flattened, food is engineered, and memory survives only in fragments.

For Mumbai-based theatre artist Akhshay Gandhi, working on Kahaniyon ka Manthan in 2023 made him question what it meant to be truly collaborative. When he started out, he assumed collaboration meant being in a room with people brimming with ideas. “Soon, I realised that when there is disagreement, we didn’t know how to creatively deal with it." So Gandhi started looking for practitioners across the world specialising in interdisciplinary work. That led him to SITI Company in New York in 2015-16 and then Odin Teatret in Denmark. There, he engaged with theatre practitioners who collaborated with architects, folk musicians, sociologists and environmentalists in a meaningful ways to create cutting edge work.

Closer home, he witnessed a similar approach by experimental theatre practitioner Veenapani Chawla of Adishakti, who would work with dancers, saxophone players, classical musicians and animation artists to compose layered moments.

In the ensuing years, Gandhi realised that for effective collaboration to take place, each artist had to be proficient in their craft. While exploring the kavad katha tradition of storytelling in contemporary theatre, Gandhi had a serendipitous encounter with dancer-curator Mayuri Upadhya, which resulted in Manthan five years later. “When Mayuri suggested Divya Warier’s name, I didn’t have much knowledge of Mohiniyattam. It was a good thing as I went in with a blank slate. We spent a lot of time talking about what it meant to be an artist—not just socially and politically but as creators as well, and devised the show over three months," he says. That experience changed something within him. He realised just how easy it was to fall into the trap of making a work look “cool, or like a spectacle", instead of"creative satisfaction".

This approach is reflected in his new projects as well. For instance, It is What it Is with projection artist Gaurav Singh Nijjer is about fragmentary thoughts that have an impact on our lives. It premiered this year in Bengaluru and will be shown at Rangshila, Mumbai, on 23 December.

Such encounters continue to inform Kulkarni’s practice as well. After the food-related workshops and exhibitions at Serendipity, she has been invited to pop-ups across the country. In fact, there is one related to wild heritage taking place in Goa on 6 December. “Art galleries have also understood the potential of dialogue between food and art and have invited me to create installations based on Goan culinary heritage," she says.

For Chandran, Serendipity is a time for breakfast meetings with curators and artists. “We just sit around and talk—something which doesn’t happen too often as we are always travelling," she says. Some of those conversations result in future collaborations. Chandran and Bickram Ghosh, for instance, are discussing a script for a musical.