In the last quarter, IFA crossed an important milestone—the launch of its new office in Mumbai. After frequent requests from grantees, trustees, patrons, friends and other well-wishers to expand our base, we finally opened our doors to Mumbai on April 7 and 8, 2012 with a grand festival at the Prithvi Theatre. Anmol Vellani, Founder and Executive Director, explained the significance of this step in his speech at the press conference for the launch. “IFA has a strong association with this city. We have supported several grants to individuals and institutions based here. While supporting the arts is of prime importance to us, it is also important to raise funds to continue our work, for which we must expand our reach. Given the scale of our investment in Mumbai, we felt that if people saw the kind of work we were doing, they would want to support us. To which end, we plan to organise a series of events featuring our grantees, beginning with The IFA Festival, Mumbai.” We are grateful to Prithvi Theatre, Project 88, Art India and Mohile Parikh Centre (MPC), who will partner IFA to host these events in Mumbai.

The Festival was inaugurated by actor Naseeruddin Shah along with Sangita Jindal, founder-chairperson, Jindal South West Foundation, actor Ratna Pathak Shah, artist Jitish Kallat, entrepreneur Jaithirth Rao, Anuradha Parikh, Managing Trustee, MPC, Shaila Parikh, Founder, MPC, filmmaker Sumantra Ghoshal, and Kunal Kapoor, Director, Prithvi Theatre.

At the launch Naseeruddin Shah was very vocal in his support for IFA’s initiative. “It is delightful that IFA has finally come to Mumbai. Since my first interaction with the organisation over a decade ago, I have discovered all the great work that it has been doing. For a young person to make the choice to be an artist is very difficult... Mercifully an organisation like IFA has come forward to lend a helping hand to artists who need subsidies to create original work or to do the kind of work for which they wouldn’t find a market and therefore we have every reason to be grateful to IFA and to be very happy that it is finally spreading its tent enough to include Mumbai,” he said in a press interview. See his complete interview here.

The International Arts Education Conference on The Artist and Education: Diversity and Justice in Bangalore was a big success and saw the participation of over 150 educators, artists, policy makers, donors and organisations. The conference was held on February 3 and 4, 2012, as part of Kali-Kalisu, IFA’s Arts Education initiative for government school teachers, supported by the Goethe-Institut/Max Mueller Bhavan. It featured four panel discussions on the role played by arts education in equipping teachers to create a just and equitable classroom.

The conference also featured breakout sessions by the Attakkalari Centre for Movement Arts, Bangalore, Almut Brunnert, PASCH Officer, Goethe Institut, Bangalore, and Radha Ramaswamy, Founder, Centre for Community Dialogue and Change. Choreographer Astad Deboo and his troupe from the Salaam Balak Trust, which provides support for street children in New Delhi and Mumbai, also conducted a breakout session, apart from presenting a moving dance performance, Breaking Boundaries.

Prior to the conference, we held a seminar on January 30 and 31, 2012 for artists working in the field of education. On February 1, we organised field visits to government schools in Chamarajanagar and Mandya to give seminar participants an opportunity to meet Kali-Kalisu trained teachers and hear their personal reflections and insights.

To know more about the outcomes of the conference write to aruna@indiaifa.org.

We made six grants for research and documentation in the last quarter to the following people:

Vikram Sampath—to study the impact of recording technology on South Indian classical music and the role played by women singers in democratising this art form.

Gautam Pemmaraju—to make a film on the declining satirical poetic tradition in Dakkhani Urdu known as Mizahiya Shairi.

Ayswarya Sankaranarayanan—to make an animation film on the 47 miniature paintings in the Pahari tradition at the Amar Mahal Palace, Jammu, which tell the story of Nala-Damayanti.

Sajitha Madathil—to write a book on the intervention of women in the performance practices of Kathakali, Singaari Melam and Mudiyattam in Kerala.

Khushboo Bharti—to write a book and create an exhibition on the role of the state government’s art patronage and policy and its impact on public art projects in Jaipur.

Himanshu Verma—to make a film on the journey of the Genda Phool songs, which form a part of the repertoire of Chhattisgarhi folk music, across varying musical, cultural and social contexts.

Artist and animation filmmaker Aditi Chitre successfully concluded a 12-day workshop for children, on story writing and illustration, in Chizami, Nagaland. The workshop, held between January and February 2012, is one of the activities supported by a special grant that is enabling Aditi to encourage children in Nagaland to explore their creativity by engaging with various styles of narration, visualisation and illustration.

“Despite an initial reluctance towards working on their own stories they opened up with a few warm-up exercises and were writing up a storm by day two. At the end of the workshop, each child had written and illustrated around three stories,” said Aditi. The next step of this project will involve the designing of a book of stories and an exhibition of the original paintings in Dimapur in July 2012.

Kolkata Sanved, a dance movement therapy organisation, which received an IFA grant to hold creative arts workshops with children living in and around four railway platforms in West Bengal, showcased some of the results of its work through its own version of a flash mob dance performance on a railway platform in the city in February.

In the last quarter we made one grant to the Pyara Kerketta Foundation in Ranchi, which partially support a two-day national conference on March 27 and 28, 2012 to facilitate critical reflection on contemporary Dalit and Adivasi theatre in India.

Over 50 artists, including several students from the Sir J. J. Institute of Applied Art and Rachna Sansad, attended the IFA and Clark House Initiative event on March 13 at Clark House, Mumbai. The event was organised to give the artists’ community in the city an overview of the support available to them from IFA. It also gave IFA staff a chance to meet artists who are experimenting with new materials, forms and idioms.

Rashmi Sawhney and Mohit Kaycee, were present at the event. They spoke about some of IFA’s earlier grants to support residencies, research and documentation and curatorial practice. This presentation fuelled an animated discussion on the importance of residencies and on the need to evolve artist-run support structures. Participants reluctantly parted after five hours of conversation only after IFA’s programme team had made several promises to ensure further interactions.

A similar event was also held in Open Space, Pune on March 16, 2012, organised with the gracious support of Ujwala Sawant and the Open Space team. It was moderated by three members of IFA’s programme staff—Ashutosh Poddar, Rashmi Sawhney and Mohit Kaycee. The objective was to engage with artists, researchers and students to gain an understanding of the kinds of arts practices being developed in the field and share details of IFA's Extending Arts Practice and New Performance programmes. Like in Mumbai, this event packed a full house and generated animated discussions about arts practice, funding and IFA's programmes. We have subsequently received many enquiries about our programmes along with several interesting project ideas.