Moving Murals | August 24, 2012 | Mumbai

Moving Murals
Temple and court spaces have vast stretches of narrative mural paintings, engaged in a losing battle with time and the administrators. 'If they can't be saved there, save them elsewhere, through documentation, digital restoration and replication on other media including cloth (kalamkari), film (animation), etc.' This is the underlying thought behind Moving Murals, a project of MV Bhaskar who has been documenting and archiving murals in Tamilnadu for eight years.

O Friend, This Waiting
A film by dancer Justin McCarthy and filmmaker Sandhya Kumar on Kshetrayya padams. Padams are love poems performed by courtesans, the dancing devadasis, who rose to prominence in the courts of the 17th century Nayaka rulers. Kshetrayya was a poet-composer from the same period, who wrote padams in Telugu, which have since been the most treasured love songs of the devadasis. O Friend, This Waiting, reflects on the entwined fortunes of the padams and the women they were written for, from the 17th to the 20th century, while dwelling in the performance spaces of temples and courts of the Nayaka period.

Moving Murals, and O Friend, This Waiting come together in more ways than one. The latter uses visual material from the former. And they come together on stage in Mumbai as Justin, Sandhya and Bhaskar walk the audience and each other through their respective work.