|
|||||
|
We have quite a bit to share from the last three months of 2010. IFA won the India NGO of the Year Award 2009 (medium category) administered by the Resource Alliance and supported by The Rockefeller Foundation. The award recognises not-for-profit organisations for setting good standards and practices in resource mobilisation, accountability and transparency, and for demonstrating excellent stewardship of philanthropic resources. IFA’s achievements in arts philanthropy are a reflection of the remarkable work of our grantees and the crucial support of our experts, evaluators, collaborators and advisors. And we must thank our donors and Friends of IFA, whose generous contributions make our work possible. Please continue to support us. We are also delighted to announce that IFA’s Deputy Director, Arundhati Ghosh was named the winner of the Global Fundraiser of the Year Award 2009-10 organised by the Resource Alliance and supported by The Rockefeller Foundation.
|
|||||
| Recent Projects | |||||
| New Grantees | |||||
| Our Arts and Research Documentation programme is supporting the Roja Muthiah Research Library (RMRL), Chennai to host a two-day conference that will focus on the function of the archive in determining the history of early Tamil film. Prof. Steven Hughes, Principal Advisor for the conference, says, “We are calling for a collaborative intervention centered on archival practice as a way of preserving, evaluating and re-energizing the history of early Tamil cinema.” Zuleikha Chaudhari of New Delhi is developing an installation project RELOCATE (working title) under our Extending Arts Practice programme. She is collaborating with Ali Zaidi of motiroti, London and Simone Anne von Büren, Switzerland to create an installation of light, sound, text, video and space. In contrast to Zuleikha Chaudhari’s deliberate elimination of the performer, our latest New Performance grantee—Sujata Goel of Auroville —will be foregrounding the performer to critique the development of her own artistic identity as a dancer in her multi-media performance titled She Said She Was a Dancer. These upcoming works exemplify the divergent experiments that IFA supports in the contemporary arts. Aasakta Kalamanch, Pune is our other grantee under the New Performance programme. Four young directors—Alok Rajwade, Nipun Dharmadhikar, Varun Narvekar and Sarang Sathye—are collaborating to adapt Martin Crimp’s Attempts On Her Life and devise a new performance piece Teechi Satra Prakarney. Incorporating different narrative points of view, mobile scenic design and multimedia images, the production explores the social and psychological complexities of an absent protagonist who is accused, abused and branded. |
|||||
|
|||||
| Kali-Kalisu : Joining Hands with the Government of Karnataka | |||||
Kali-Kalisu—IFA’s initiative, supported by Goethe-Institut/Max Mueller Bhavan, towards incorporating the arts in school education across rural Karnataka—has attracted the attention of the Government of Karnataka. Sarva Siksha Abhyan invited IFA to start a pilot project in Sirsi. Under the Kali-Kalisu banner, we administered a six-day workshop from January 8 to 13, 2011 for 52 primary and middle-level teachers at Tapovana, Yellapur. The teachers were exposed to theatre, puppetry and the visual arts enabling them to explore creative tools and arts-based approaches in their everyday teaching. The workshop, which got an overwhelming response from the participating teachers, will be followed by shared meetings with the teachers and a few hand-holding sessions. The trainers are currently supervising direct classroom sessions with the children.
|
|||||
Udupi Children’s Festival |
|||||
The Udupi Children’s Festival supported by Sarva Shiksha Abhiyan was organised by IFA from October 18 to 21, 2010, at Vidyaniketan School, Kapu, Udupi district. This residential festival enabled more than 500 children from schools in the interior parts of the Udupi district to play with and explore their own creativity through puppetry, theatre and the visual arts. |
|||||
| In The Public Eye | |||||
|
|||||
ArtConnect: Special Issue on the Performing Arts |
|||||
The latest issue of ArtConnect is now available and features essays on actor training, a residency for choreographers, and the reconstruction of a storytelling tradition, critical reviews of dance and theatre productions, and much else besides. Click here to subscribe to ArtConnect or become a Friend of IFA and get ArtConnect for free.
|
|||||
IFA Grantee Raises Funds for IFA |
|||||
In a significant gesture, Mahmood Farooqui, through his performance of Dastangoi on September 25, 2010 in Bangalore, became IFA’s first grantee to help raise funds for our grant making in the arts. You can read a preview here and a review here . Frontline featured Dastangoi in length here
|
|||||
6th Asian Museum Curators’ Conference (AMCC) 2010 IFA partnered the Japan Foundation to hold the 6th Asian Museum Curators’ Conference in Bangalore from October 19 to 22, 2010 on the theme ‘Curatorship: From Empire to Republic’. The conference addressed the expansion of curatorial activity and the role of the curator as well as the difficult relationship between curatorial practice and spectatorship in Asia. |
|||||
|
IFA Film Festival We launched our first IFA Film Festival in Thrissur. It was held between October 8 and 10, 2010. It was previewed here and here . We plan to organise two such festivals every year, mostly in smaller towns/cities, to increase the accessibility of the diverse audio-visual works we support and connect with newer audiences. The IFA Film Festival is currently running at the National Gallery of Modern Art, Bangalore (January 2 to February 20, 2011). Ten films are being screened: Saba Dewan’s The Other Song; K. M. Madhusudanan’s Maya Bazaar; Shabani Hassanwalia’s Out of Thin Air; Lalit Vachani’s Natak Jari Hain; Amitabh Chakraborty’s Bishar Blues; Nishtha Jain’s City of Photos; Ajay Bhardwaj’s Kitte Mil Ve Mahi; Pooja Kaul’s Rasiken Re; Arghya Basu’s The Listener’s Tale; and R. V. Ramani’s Nee Engey. Read some of the festival previews here and here. |
||||
|
|||||
| Announcement | |||||
Anupam Kher will perform in Feroz Khan’s Kucch Bhi Ho Sakta Hai in Bangalore on March 25, 2011 at Chowdiah Memorial Hall. This is a fundraiser for IFA. Please do attend the show and support IFA. |
|||||
| Slant, Stance | |||||
Actor and filmmaker Kirtana Kumar was one of the panelists who spoke at the Arts Education Conference 2010 in Bangalore. She has been actively involved in theatre for over 15 years. She has variously trained in Suzuki Theatre, Butoh, Thang-ta, Kalaripayattu, Carnatic vocals and choral singing. She is presently researching and developing indigenous theatre pedagogies and skills for theatre-making. She is a trustee of Women’s Artists’ Group that runs the year-long Theatre Lab for children and the proprietor of Little Jasmine Films, Bangalore. She also runs Infinite Souls, a rural artists’ retreat in Magadi, near Bangalore. Kirtana Kumar talks about partnerships, conditions, questions and independent artists who are actively involved in arts education.
At the second edition of the Arts Education Conference, you were on the panel Partnerships Within and Beyond the School. What is the range of partnerships you have forged over the years; and do you think we are on our way to creating the best conditions for fostering meaningful partnerships? In the early days, partnerships meant artist-artist partnerships, where we shared ideas and work, acted as substitute teachers for each other’s students and pooled resources. Slowly the circle of partnerships expanded to include schools, government and non-governmental organizations. I had fantastic years of opportunity working with marginalized groups in four states. The work with kothis in Belgaum and intravenous drug users in Manipur is lodged in my heart. Rangashankara and IFA brought with them a host of new avenues. I curated and was director of the Ancillary Programs at the 2009 Rangashankara Children’s Theatre Festival and have subsequently been engaged with their Wanderlust collaboration with Schnawwl Theatre, Mannheim in various capacities including training, dramaturgy and pedagogy. And now, with Infinite Souls Artists Retreat, I am better equipped to foster the projects and collaborations of other artists. The best conditions to foster partnerships? An atmosphere of openness. A strong network of artists and patrons. A sustained belief in the evolution of a community and not merely the showcasing of an individual’s work. A real commitment to challenging each other while supporting attempts that are brave, honest and that raise the bar in terms of not craft alone, but intention as well. There’s a lot of available work for theatre artists in India. Both the government (eg NIPCID) and NGO sector (APSA, CWC, Samuha etc) offer possibilities. But you have to be willing to learn, travel, work in rural areas and to extend yourself into different communities. Theatres like Rangashankara and Jagriti, inevitably create industry, with work for actors, playwrights, directors, designers, pedagogues and production persons. An interest in drama exams has increased opportunities for teachers. Right now, this means the foreign exam boards such as Royal College of Music, Trinity-Guildhall etc. But my hope is that, if students continue to desire testing in theatre, we develop indigenous systems for the same. What do you think are the better questions we should be asking in the field of Arts Education—questions that should become urgent topics for discussions? I think the burning question is, why the arts? What are our objectives in teaching the arts in India today? Given that we have this 5,000 year old perfected heritage or burden, depending on how you view it, shouldn’t art now be left to the devices of disenchantment, youth, vagrancy, sexuality and its ilk? I suspect that if one asks the question ‘Why Art?’ in schools the answer will, more often than not, have to do with tradition and some vague sense of the inherent value of art. And in the same breath there would be a passive-aggressive expectation that art be productivist in some way. All deadening stuff in my opinion. The other good question is about the link between the arts and spirituality. Stick your neck out and ask this one in a crowd and see what happens. There will be some hemming, a little hawing and much clucking about secularism and the separation between art, politics, religion, yadda, yadda, yadda. But really, it is in fact that great orgasm and that upliftment of the human spirit that we should be curious about. The rest is window dressing and cushion covers. You also have a new series of interviews on your CARP blog called Guerrilla Functionaries— independent artists who are actively involved in arts education. Can you tell us more about it? The Ranga Shankara Pedagogy Symposium (2009) and the IFA-Goethe Institut Arts Education Conferences brought on this series. In looking at national and international arts education scenarios, I felt that we needed first to be cognizant of the local, daily practice of arts educators who fall outside the net of school, government, NGO etc. The classes that have been run for decades by individuals some of whom are quietly engaged in seriously heavy-duty work. I mean, talk about best practice, these are the warriors, really. Also, if you look at their work, you will often find that they speak the language of the Seoul Agenda, even if they have never heard of it. Because they have their ears to the ground, are watching out for their students and are not driven by ‘prestige’ compulsions. The intention is often old fashioned—a simple transference of knowledge, but sometimes, because the teachers themselves are so inspired by the sheer joy of their art, the student is impacted for life. I offer you some examples… Gita Chacko and Louise Pinto who have taught piano to generations of Bangaloreans. Before them there was Marion Fewkes at the old Max Mueller Bhavan. Talking about the old MMB, what about Balan Nambiar who taught many of us painting (I count myself and N. Pushpamala in that gang). The barber on Old Poor House Road who taught nadaswaram. Bangalore has had several very qualified drama teachers. Anita Loganathan has inspired scores of visual artists. And yet we never give their experiences an ear or examine their role in good arts education practice. So I figured, I would. Finally, as an independent artist actively involved in arts education and working closely with schools, have you detected some or various underestimated practices in schools that can be incorporated to align with the goals of Arts Education? Frankly I think that schools, by definition, are opposed to the idea of the arts. Meaning, art as a field that is ever-open; seeking, questioning, looking for divinity, willing to fail and fall flat on its face. Schools depend on conformity and don’t wish to disturb the status quo. And if there is a crisis in education today it is because of this very opposition. Schools may need the arts to fill a few ‘light’ hours, to break the monotony. They will therefore organise a few arts events. What works for them, on campus, will be traditional and codified arts which pose no threat e.g. Bharatanatyam, western classical music, non-challenging theatre. There are few conversations about the significance of art. So how can we expect good arts practice from schools? Even those who are allegedly alternative or international and claim an advanced interest in the arts will display the same characteristics in the long haul. Certainly there are exceptions (Tara Kini ran a great Hindustani music program at Mallya Aditi International School that has seen many offshoots including Sunaad) but we are talking about the norm here. No, I think that the underestimated practice is that of the small independent arts teachers as mentioned before. The piano teacher who taught in her parlour for 30 years and communicated a passion for Chopin to her students, the art teacher who brought a cow into her class and took her students wading through a mud pond, the Yoga teacher near Sajjan Rao Circle who started a free vyayamshala for young children who migrate to Bangalore. |
|||||
---------------------------------------------- |
|||||
Please do send us your feedback and response at swar@indiaifa.org with "Feedback" in the subject line. |
|||||
