For a series of workshops culminating in a two-day public art festival in the Chitpur locality of old Kolkata. These workshops are designed to re-energise and activate this locality which has a rich history and heritage, through various cultural activities, innovative audience engagement and archiving with the help of local residents, businessmen, artists, craftsmen, teachers and students. Outcomes of the project will include a website, an exhibition and a DVD documenting the process.
For research into the field recordings, texts and photographs of the Dutch ethnomusicologist Arnold Bake, during his time in Bengal from 1925 to 1934. Based on this archival material gathered from various archives in India and abroad, she will construct histories of music and portraits of people and places, thus adding to and energising the existing archive for folk music, 'The Travelling Archive'. The outcomes will be an exhibition and a book.
For the creation of a solo performance based Shurpanakha in the Ramayana, incorporating different readings of this enigmatic character—as a shape shifting raksashi, a beautiful woman, and a victim of patriarchal norms—found in various versions of the epic. The performance will include new songs in Braj, a local dialect of Hindi and create a movement vocabulary extending beyond the traditional repertoire of Kathak.
For a series of children’s workshops that imaginatively explore the patua folklore and its social and cultural environment towards the creation of children’s theatre performances. Situated primarily in two patua villages, Nayagram and Pingla in West Bengal, the project will focus on the children of the patua community offering them opportunities to reinvigorate the now dormant performative element of the Patachitra tradition.
For collaborative exploration between a Kathak dancer and a contemporary dancer, that poses questions for both these artists, pushing the classical dancer to open himself up to contemporary approaches of performance making; and the contemporary choreographer to work with and from the sensibilities of a classical idiom. The outcome will be a performance scheduled to premiere in December 2014.
For a part-documentary part-fiction film on the Bengali writer Nabarun Bhattacharya’s life and work which will explore his creative and psychological processes. The film will experiment with the ‘fantastic’ in an attempt to push the bounds of cinematic art and of current practices in the documentary and fiction film modes. The film will be disseminated through international television channels, film festivals, the internet and other non-mainstream avenues.
For research towards a book on the works of Kalam Patua, a patachitra artist. This project will trace his journey from a practitioner of the traditional painting of Patuas to his transition as painter whose work is displayed in modern art galleries, particularly after the revival of the Kalighat pat in the 1990s.
For creative arts workshops with children living in and around four railway platforms in West Bengal. Drawing inspiration from the dramatic, rhythmic and free-flowing character of railway platforms, the project will enable the children to experience and explore a wide range of artistic processes drawn from storytelling, movement, music and theatre. The workshops will lead to four large site-specific performances and the emergence of the four organisations as community cultural centres.
For the collection, digitization and archiving of 78 rpm gramophone records of Bengali plays performed between 1900 and 1930. The project will document the plays performed on stage as well as those produced exclusively for gramophone recordings.
For research on the history of Bengali Cartoons starting from the late nineteenth century to post-Independence India. The resulting book will examine the development of cartoons from a discursive art form in early publications to a space for critical discourse on colonial domination, self- representation, and the process of modernisation.
