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India Foundation for the Arts
Quarterly Newsletter Edition 20
October-December 2011
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Apply: Grants & Fellowships
Grants
IFA’s Arts Research and Documentation programme invites proposals from researchers and artists under its Bengali Language Initiative.
Details
Supporting IFA
IFA’s influence, position and visibility in the arts world have grown fairly rapidly in the recent past, and with it, IFA’s responsibility to the arts. There are greater demands on us today. People look to us to address emerging needs and concerns in the arts. We need a facility that enables us to play this larger role. This is where we need your support. You can help us create a permanent home for the arts by contributing to our Capital Campaign and by spreading the word about this campaign among all your friends who care deeply about the future of the arts in India. Contributions start at just Rs 4,000 and are tax-deductible. Details

Learn about the Arts as you support them. Become a Friend of IFA. As a Friend, you will be contributing directly to philanthropy in the arts and encouraging the presence of the arts in public life. It starts at just Rs 3,500/- a year and your donation is tax-deductible. In return, you will receive exclusive access to IFA events, the ArtConnect magazine, and our annual reports.

Buy Now!
IFA Publications
Beyond the Proscenium
Beyond the Proscenium: Reimagining the Space for Performance
Edited by Anmol Vellani
176 pp., Rs 300, US$ 20
Buy Online!
Mail: editor@indiaifa.org

IFA in your city
You wouldn’t want to miss IFA in your city. Follow us on Facebook and Twitter. All events are public and free, unless otherwise stated.

The following events were held in different cities in the last three months:

bird_bullet KOLKATA
Zuleikha Chaudhari
Dance Performance
Surpanakha: An Experiment with Kathak
By Ashavari Majumdar
6.30 pm,
February 22, 2012
Rabindranath Tagore Centre, ICCR, 9A Ho Chi Minh Sarani
bird_bullet CHENNAI
Zuleikha Chaudhari
Grantee Presentation
Alternative Forms of Mural Conservation, Reconstruction and Restoration
By M V Bhaskar, an Extending Arts Practice programme grantee
November 3, 2011
bird_bullet ALLAHABAD
Zuleikha Chaudhari
Film Festival
IFA Film Festival
IFA in association with The Centre for Theatre and Film, University of Allahabad, organised a film festival showcasing five films made by IFA grantees.
October 21 and 22, 2011

Special Mention
Over the years we have received tremendous support from a number of people. We would like to thank all these people, whose support has made a significant difference to the reach and impact of our work.

Thank you Gita S and Sajai Singh for helping us spread the word about IFA this quarter.

BIG PICTURE II Catalogue Cover
A still from the short film In Transience, by Ekta Mittal, which retells stories of the work and life of Indian labourers. Ekta is a recipient of IFA’s Archival Fellowship.
Image courtesy Paromita Dhar
For the first time since IFA’s inception, two of its programme divisions—Arts Research and Documentation and Extending Arts Practice—are collaborating on a new initiative, The Archival Fellowships. This initiative aims to encourage archives to play a more dynamic role in building discourse in the arts. It supports artists to engage creatively with different archives while simultaneously enriching their own arts practice.

IFA awarded two archival fellowships in the last three months. One went to Ekta Mittal for research at the Archives of Indian Labour. This research closely follows her work documenting the lives of migrant labourers, which culminated in the film, In Transience. Ekta expects her research to lead to a travelling exhibition, titled Art in Labour, which will bring together archival material and footage generated during the filming of In Transience.

The second fellowship is being shared by Samina Mishra and Nandini Chandra. They will study how the films archived with the Children’s Film Society of India embody the state’s imagining and representation of the Indian child. Samina and Nandini will also examine the different ways in which these films were disseminated and their impact on the children who watched them.

Arts Education

Kali-Kalisu—IFA’s art education initiative for government school teachers, supported by the Goethe-Institut/Max Mueller Bhavan—organised its third International Arts Education Conference on ‘The Artist and Education: Diversity and Justice’ on February 3 and 4, 2012 at the National Gallery of Modern Art, Bangalore.

This event came in the wake of three successful regional conferences organised in Bidar, Dharwad and Mysore for government school teachers who had participated in earlier Kali-Kalisu workshops. While the regional conferences focused on the sharing and interpretation of experiences of the workshop participants, the international conference focused on addressing important challenges facing educators today, especially within the context of the Right to Education Act (2009). How arts education might address gender inequalities and the absence of shared values, and promote cultural inclusion were among the issues debated at the conference.

Arts Research and Documentation

We are proud to announce that Makarand Sathe launched his three-volume publication, Marathi Natakachya Tees Ratri - Ek Samajik Rajkiya Itihas (30 Nights of Marathi Theatre - A Socio-Political History) on December 5, 2011 in Mumbai. An IFA grant supported the research towards these books, brought out by Popular Prakashan. Sathe has since received a second grant for the translation of his manuscript into English.

Curatorship
Part of a 74-slide installation of Ranbir Kaleka’s work, which Akansha Rastogi created for her curatorial residency project titled Parenthetic Exercises: Archiving the Studio.
Image courtesy KHOJ International Artists’ Association

Curatorship

Akansha Rastogi, Rattananmol Johal and Leon Tan presented curatorial projects that they developed during the second curatorial residency at KHOJ International Artists’ Association at an exhibition titled Augmenting Practices in November 2011. Akansha inhabited and archived artist Ranbir Kaleka’s studio during the residency period. Each object in the resulting exhibition was derived from the artist’s practice, studio space, artworks and sites of artistic production and thereby offered reflections on Kaleka’s artistic process. The audience was deliberately exposed to the absence of the artist’s work, thereby making the exhibition space a performative examination of the relationship between artistic autonomy and curatorial practice. Rattananmol explored the evolution of the documentary medium—its questioning of the complexities of representing multiple/subjective truths and its exhibition in a contemporary art space. Leon curated KHOJ’s archival material using networked platforms, making it widely accessible to online audiences. Through augmented reality platforms on mobile phones, audiences closely following KHOJ’s historical art activities across the subcontinent encountered images from the archives linked to contextual information.

The Katha Centre for Film Studies (KCFS), Mumbai, organised a mentoring workshop on film curatorial practice at the Whistling Woods International Campus on December 23, 2011. Previous workshops were held in collaboration with the Bhau Daji Lad Museum and the Chhatrapati Shivaji Maharaj Vastu Sangrahalaya in Mumbai. At the event, Kaushik Bhaumik, Delhi-based archivist and curator, discussed and helped develop the curatorial packages of seven participants. These packages will be shown at multiple venues in Mumbai in February and March 2012 and will examine diverse aspects of cinema—the significance of silences (literal and metaphorical) within the soundtrack of a film, the changing aesthetics in documentary filmmaking, the creation of a space for unreleased ‘art’ films, and food as a recurrent film theme.

Special Grants

We are delighted to announce that we made two new special grants last quarter.

With our support, Kolkata Sanved, a dance and movement therapy organisation, will collaborate with four civil society organisations to conduct creative art workshops with children living on four railway platforms in West Bengal. These workshops will lead to four performances on the very platforms that the children inhabit and help to establish community cultural centres at the four civil society organisations involved in the project.

Aditi Chitre received a grant to hold storytelling and visual art workshops with children from Chizami in Nagaland. In the absence of any encouragement for the visual arts in Nagaland, Aditi seeks to give the children an opportunity to explore and experiment with their creativity. The project will result in a book of stories illustrated by the children and two exhibitions of their artworks.

New Performance

In the last quarter Navtej Johar was supported to create a multi-media dance-drama performance based on Jean Genet’s play The Maids. Combining padams in Bharatanatyam with the narrative of the play, the performance will reflect on the lives of devadasis.

Our New Performances programme also enabled Badungduppa Kalakendra, a theatre group in Assam, to conduct a series of exploratory workshops that helped four theatre groups evolve a theatre language of their own. The resulting performances were staged at the Under the Sal Tree 2011 theatre festival on December 21 and 22 in Rampur village, Goalpara district, Assam, and later travelled to the workplaces of each participating group.

To know more about the festival, please read the Slant/Stance interview below with the Creative Director of Badungduppa —Sukracharjya Rabha.

Arms & the Man poster
Cast of the play August: Osage County directed by Lillete Dubey
Events

Our upcoming fundraiser is the play August: Osage County directed by Lillete Dubey. Adapted from a Pulitzer Prize winning play by Tracy Letts, it narrates the story of a dysfunctional family that has come together after several years, over the disappearance of its patriarch. The play explores the themes of family, mother-daughter relationships, sibling rivalry and spousal conflicts through a crisp and incisive script, acted out by a brilliant cast.

It is being staged at the Chowdiah Memorial Hall on March 11, 2012 and features performances by Lillete Dubey, Kitu Gidwani, Sandhya Mridul, Suchitra Pillai, Ira Dubey/ Nandita Dubey, Denzil Smith, Amar Talwar, Maneesh Verma, Danny Sura, Auritra Ghosh and Meeta Vasisht.

The donations received through this performance will be used by IFA to continue its grant making in the arts. For details, call Joyce at 2341 4681/82/83 between 10 am and 5 pm or email joyce@indiaifa.org.

Slant / Stance
Merajur Rahman Baruah
Badungduppa Kalakendra, a theatre group from Assam, was supported by India Foundation for the Arts to hold a series of exploratory workshops for four contemporary theatre directors and their groups over four months. The grant enabled the directors to analyse their individual performances and receive feedback from their contemporaries and experts in the field. The workshops culminated in a two-day festival, titled ‘Under the Sal Tree 2011 —Parichay + Atma Parichay’, which premiered the four performances of the visiting directors at the Badungduppa premises in the village of Rampur, Goalpara district, Assam. The four performances subsequently travelled to the workplaces of the respective participant groups.

We speak to Sukracharjya Rabha, an award-winning theatre director from Assam and the creative director of Badungduppa Kalakendra, which he established in 1998, about his motives for organising Under the Sal Tree 2011 and about theatre in Assam.

IFA: What is the nature of mainstream theatre practices in Assam today?

Sukracharjya Rabha: Mainstream theatre, including mobile theatre, focuses on producing formulaic, saleable products that promote cultural stereotypes in Assam. They fail to be representative of the cultural and social realities of contemporary Assamese society with its extant forms of oppression, rapid industrialisation and cultural changes. Their function remains to reinforce established and accepted values and manners and a lot of their material is borrowed from television soap operas and from Bollywood. Much of the work being created in Assamese theatre today neither emerges from an inner impulse nor responds to the immediate contexts in which artists and audiences live and create.

Despite the government’s considerable financial support to North Eastern States like Assam, artists are not critically engaging with the creative process involved in the making of a new performance piece. Government sponsored workshops conducted by trained theatre practitioners from the National School of Drama fail to produce remarkable results in Assam because these experts cannot encourage the creation of work within the Assamese context. An example of this disconnect is seen through past performances of Rupalim (one of Sukracharjya’s earlier productions). It was done at a time when I was deeply influenced by my workshops with NSD theatre artists. The sets, props and costumes used for the play were colourful and elaborate. The entire production was not very economical. It is difficult to stage such grand plays in rural Assam. I soon realised that in order to reach larger audiences I needed to make do with existing infrastructure. This is one of the reasons why Badungduppa plays today are performed in open spaces with simple costumes and minimal props.

Arms & the Man poster
Theatre artists from Macbeth Drama, Dhemaji, Assam,
performing Ruddhra Prabahinee at Under the Sal Tree 2011

IFA: Where does Badungduppa’s work fit into this scenario?

Sukracharjya Rabha: Through Badungduppa we make an attempt to hear our own voices and reflect on the process through which each performance journeys. Our scripts and performance styles are rooted in Assamese traditions and legends. In addition to creating our own performances, we conduct a range of activities like workshops and community-centred projects for performing artists.

Badungduppa Kalakendra’s aim is to create performances that resonate with rural audiences yet craft stories within the present context of life in Assam. All said and done, our plays do not pander to the tastes of our audience; instead we try to give them something to think about. It is for this reason that one of our critical focus areas has been the creation of a healthy network of audience members who appreciate our work.

IFA: This year, you decided to change the format of Under the Sal Tree to make its focus more about encouraging young directors to critically engage with the theatre-making process through experimentation. What were the reasons behind the decision?

Sukracharjya Rabha: Since its inception, Under the Sal Tree has always been festival centric. The first Under the Sal Tree theatre festival focused on the celebration of rituals through theatre. Over the next few years our themes revolved around the dramatisation of folk tales and on retelling legends through theatre. Our intention in those years was to encourage the collection of scattered and endangered folk tales and legends while creating a theatre identity unique to our region and expanding our reach to the common audience. This year, we shifted our focus from the festival format of our earlier efforts to the content of the plays being performed and to the theatre-making process followed by the visiting directors. We wanted young artists to experiment with the theatre-making process, drawing inspiration from their rich cultural heritage, to create a theatre language unique to the region.

Under the old format we found that we were not able to engage with our participants in the long term. We also felt that the ‘invitation only’ format of the festival was restricting young artists from approaching us and that by performing only for audiences in Rampur we were shutting out voices from other parts of Assam.

Under the Sal Tree 2011 addresses these concerns.

IFA: In what way?

Sukracharjya Rabha: To begin with, we made the festival process-oriented, placing emphasis on the interactions between the participants and a panel of facilitators, consisting of Mrinal Bora, Sankar Venkateswaran and me. We gave each participant an outsider’s perspective of their work. In addition to this, our theme this year was ‘Parichay+Atma Parichay’, which, roughly translated, refers to Personal Identity. Assam has been going through many changes over the past few years, both political and cultural. On the one hand traditional hierarchies are getting strengthened and on the other hand new societal hierarchies are emerging. How do we, as artists, respond to these changes? This is the question we posed to all our participants.

Interestingly, this may well be the first forum to encourage interactions between theatre groups from both Upper and Lower Assam. Four groups from Dhemaji, Mongaldoi, Jorhat and Tinsukia, got a chance to critique each other through Under the Sal Tree 2011 and travelled together to perform their plays to their respective audiences.

I am very happy with the outcome of Under the Sal Tree this year. Each theatre group that participated in it came with an entourage of 20 members. Each was trained to open up their approach to the theatre-making process. It is heartening to think that all these participants will now go back to their respective regions and put all the lessons into practice.

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