The Kala Ghoda Art Festival 2010 kicked off to a rollicking start on Saturday. After sampling a bit of literature, visual art, music and food through the day, I finally settled on theatre for my final course in the night. The play ‘Dance Like A Man’ was being staged at Horniman Circle at 7.30 p.m.

I’ve attended music events at Horniman Circle before, most of them Kala Ghoda Art Festival events. It is an unconventional setting, a stage in the center of a park. But it works really well, more so for a play than a music concert given the intimate interaction that is possible between audience and performer.

A bench-painting event had been conducted earlier in the evening owing to which all the seating en route to the stage bore ‘Wet Paint’ signboards. It was too dark for photography and I was eager to get to the stage before the play started but I passed some interesting art on the way. (I hope one of us will be able to post photographs soon).

Just as well, I suppose, since we got there just about five minutes before the play began. All the seats were taken so we sat down on the grass and that’s how we watched the entire play. Normally, I would not consider squatting on the ground for a play but like I said, this was an unconventional setting.

The stage and seating area were edged on one side by ‘Lotuses of the Floating World’, an art installation by Sabrina Mascarehas. As I approached the area, I first thought they were diyas floating in a pool. But I soon realized that there is no water body inside the park and the temperature was the uncharacteristic cool of February rather than the heat of a hundred lamps. (Click here to read the whole post)

The Kala Ghoda Art Festival 2010 kicked off this morning (yesterday morning, technically, since its past midnight as I’m writing this).

My favorite time during the entire of this annual event (Click here to read the whole post)

So much of the colour at Kala Ghoda comes from not just the artists but the visitors as well. That little street is awash with colour. Art students display their fledgling works. Aspiring writers congregate with journalists. Photographers stroll around, cameras casually hung around their necks. Families wander around wonder and curiosity writ large on their faces. Busy corporate types step out to ‘catch the fest’, ties loosened around their necks and their reactions escaping from their normally controlled faces. Tourists bustle about, wide-eyed at the colour. Teenagers mill about, their natural energy, for once, shared by everyone in the crowd alike, age irrespective.

The different faces of the city walk around marveling at the sights. And at each other.
(Click here to read the whole post)

The art district of Mumbai is hosting a festival. Movies are being screened, workshops conducted, books discussed, plays (and other acts) staged. There is also a mela happening!

Don’t believe me?

Here is a potter. He beckons…come closer. A grinning imp, paint streaked across his face settles down to touch the clay.

(Click here to read the whole post)

The PenTathalon sounded like fun. And unnerving given its ‘Five Exercises for Fiction Writers’ description. What does a fiction writer look like, one wondered. I found out on the morning of Saturday, 3rd February.

Kavita Bhanot, the workshop leader, turned out to be a charming, soft-spoken young lady with a clipped British accent and an eye (and ear) for detail. There were fifteen participants from various backgrounds - a journalist, a business consultant, an animation script-writer, an accountant, a former magazine editor and an advertising professional to name a few.

The five exercises were actually discussions on five aspects of fiction writing: Openings, Description , Characterization, Dialogue and Point of View. Kavita started with,

You all probably read a lot of books and enjoy them. There are actually several techniques employed by fiction writers that you would not have noticed so far because you aren’t familiar with them. In this workshop we will look at some of them and how you can use them in writing.

(Click here to read the whole post)

A lot of people come to the Kala Ghoda Art Festival in the evening. A lot of people don’t know what they are missing. And it might be a good idea to not be one of that lot of people!

I was lucky. Having signed up for a morning workshop, I ended up in town bright and early and just in time to watch the festivities being set up. I spent the entire weekend in that single lane bordered by Elphinston college, Jehangir Art Gallery, Bombay Natural History society and Rhythm House.

(Click here to read the whole post)

So the black horse races around the Islands again. The one big problem with the Kala Ghoda Art Festival is the fact that it is held where it is, right at the other end of town. I suppose that’s most easily (or at least equally) accessible for everyone in Mumbai and besides if they didn’t have it at Kala Ghoda, what would they call it? The ‘All over Mumbai’ festival doesn’t quite have the same ring, does it? :-)

I was at Kala Ghoda on the 5th February. The event I was looking for was Rural Rhythms, to be performed by a group of young dancers under the tutelage of Ms.Rajee Narayanan. They were performing a series of rope-dance sequences. Each girl had a pair of wooden sticks, from one of which was attached a long coloured rope. The other ends of all the ropes were fastened to a metal ring hovering over the stage.

I entered as one dance was in progress, the girls clacking their sticks together and weaving smoothly in and out of circles around each other. As we watched, the coloured ropes wove together in a symmetric design, all done, as the commentator pointed out, without looking up or missing a beat in the dance. And when the rope weaving was complete, the music stopped for a minute for the audience to admire the girls’ handiwork. Then they began again, this time in a different set of steps, to a different pulse and un-weaving the ropes. When they finished, every coloured rope hung individually as it had when they began, no knots, tangles or twists visible. Just perfectly synchronized to come apart in time to the end of the song.

The group performed 3 sequences, each one peaking with a different design of weave on the ropes and ending, as always with the girls impeccably in place and the ropes hanging gracefully separate. My camera-phone proved to be woefully inadequate in capturing some stills of the dance but I did manage a few shots of the girls after the dance was over.

I have been rather disappointed with the festival in the past couple of years…last year was more like an ‘Expo’ sale than a real festival of culture. It’s a precious enough time in a city that runs on clockwork precision number-like efficiency to spot colour, music, dance, photography, painting, sculpture, architecture, literature and generally anything that qualifies as art here. I was starting to miss it and wonder if KGAF had succumbed to the hard reality of mundane Mumbai too.

I’m so glad to say it hasn’t. The festival this year is remarkably back in shape. I’ve only managed one visit and 1.5 events but I know its back…you can virtually smell the spirit of the festival in the air again! At the entrance to the triangle, you are greeted by a huge lemon-and-green chillis (sculpture?effigy?stuffed something?). Right next to it is a glass case full of smaller replicas of the city’s most famous good luck charm.

Furthur up ahead is an ‘auto-copter’. Based on the fantasy of a person who got caught in Mumbai’s traffic and wished he could just lift up in the autorickshaw and fly away. Ah….wouldn’t we all wish that?

To the right, you spot a large, sparkling white model of a plane. What strikes you is…how very WHITE it is. Shining in the backdrop of the night sky, this is mounted on a base that on closer inspection, has some portraits barely visible but come to light, once you notice them. They’re all faces of people, virtually indistinguishable by gender or age. But they all look asleep…in a disturbed sleep. Does that signify the onslaught of war, terror and violence on all of as we ‘blissfully slumber’..or perhaps not? Maybe. That’s how I read it.

Art outside the galleries and out on the roads. Art for someone who can’t name the greats of art history. Art for those who appreciate beauty and music and ideas, simply for themselves. Art of all of us. I’m so glad the Kala Ghoda Art Festival is back in form.