Staying Connected #10 | Conversations at an Arts Festival and a Report on Contemporary Dance | July 17, 2020

The impositions of lockdown have changed the nature of our social interactions. Creation, co-creation and sharing of work have become extremely challenging for people working in the arts and culture. In this context, can you think of a different future for arts practice? How can we push ourselves to think beyond just going digital? Are there more ways to adapt to the new realities?
 
While we ponder over these questions, this edition of the Staying Connected Series by India Foundation for the Arts (IFA) brings you work of our grantees and experts in the field that discuss arts practice and various questions around it. We present before you, a playlist full of animated conversations on the different dimensions of arts practice at Past Forward: Celebrating Critical Practices, a festival by IFA held in Bangalore last year, and a report on Contemporary Dance in India Today: A Survey by Annette Leday that IFA supported for translation from French to English.

Contemporary Dance in India Today: A Survey, an extensive report on the contemporary dance ecosystem in India was produced by Annette Leday, a leading choreographer, director trained in France and India, as a commission of the National Dance Center, Paris (Centre National de la Danse) in 2019. This report, originally in French, includes interviews with contemporary dancers from across India and gives a broad vision of the landscape of dance in the country. This will be useful for dancers, scholars, students of dance, and also those interested in the practice as an audience or critic. Click here to access both the English and French versions of the document.

The translation of this report from French to English was commissioned by IFA along with Association Keli-Paris.

Past Forward: Celebrating Critical Practices is a three-day arts festival organised by IFA in collaboration with Bangalore International Centre (BIC) in 2019. Spread across disciplines such as photography, visual arts, theatre, video installation, film, gaming, graphic art, sound, music, dance and puppetry, this festival brought together a diverse line-up of projects supported under the Arts Practice programme in the past five years, in six curated themes of Interrogating Pasts, Confluence of Forms, Engaging Communities, Making Meanings of Myths, Thinking Audiences and Imagining Futures. Under each of these themes, there was a panel discussion where artists discussed the contours of the subject and their work associated with it. The journeys they took fascinated the audience. Click here to access the playlist with recordings of the panel discussions, along with two short festival films, and keynote addresses by Sunil Shanbag and B Jayashree.

This festival was supported by its philanthropy partners – Bangalore International Centre, Biocon Limited, C. Krishniah Chetty Group Of Jewellers, Goethe-Institut / Max Mueller Bhavan, RMZ Foundation, Sandeep and Gitanjali Maini Foundation, and Jaithirth (Jerry) Rao; and outreach partner – Kempegowda International Airport Bengaluru.