In the last week of February, the first edition of IFA's New Performance Festival was held in Bangalore. The festival brought together four very different performances whose creation was funded under our New Performance programme. The idea behind the New Performance programme is to support
performance artists who take risks by, for example, drawing on different artistic genres and languages of performance. Platforms need to be created to showcase these productions and the festival thus becomes an important extension of the programme...
In the last three months, IFA support has gone out to three new projects including an unusual new multi-disciplinary arts residency based in Bangalore called the Bengaluru Artist Residency or bar1. Christoph Storz, one of the organisers, says, describing the potential of bar1, "A residency can create, at
least for a moment, the nice illusion for an arriving guest that life is starting anew. Nothing is done, nothing is said yet. This is an unknown place in a maybe unknown town in an unknown air." Echoing him Parvez Kabir, critic-in-residence at Peers – another IFA-funded artists' residency...
The past achievements and future directions of IFA’s decade-old Arts Education programme were recently the subject of an in-depth discussion. Our grants under this programme have supported a whole gamut of approaches to arts education. Research on teaching methodologies, sustained classroom interventions, and the creation of resources for arts education have been some of the areas covered. A review panel consisting of Ashoke Chatterjee, ex-Director, National Institute of Design, Maya Menon, Founder-Director of The Teacher Foundation, and Jeroo Mulla, senior teacher of Film Studies, conducted a comprehensive review of the programme...
Performance has been the theme of several recent IFA grants. Some grantees are creating new performance pieces while others are working on performance as a subject of study and documentation. Manipur's Mangangsana Meitei, a balladeer and musician, is developing a performance based on the mythical story of Phou-Oibi. Puppeteer Varun Narain and ballet dancer Rea Krishnatraye are collaborating on a dance and puppetry combination called Giselle ki Kahani - an Indian version of the 19th century French ballet, while Thiruvananthapuram's Jyothish M G is working towards staging a Malayalam adaptation of Macbeth...