My fourth year at Kala Ghoda. The roads were buzzing with people, the kurta-clad, jhola-bearing individuals outnumbering the others by about 5:1. Not that I was complaining.

The Kala Ghoda festival is a nine-day long mela for a large section of Mumbai’s population. This year, as most years before it, the district came alive with art installations, pavement galleries, a hundred small kiosks selling quaint knickknacks and hordes of people ambling through the main thoroughfare, pausing every now and then to cast puzzled looks at the installations, or exclaim at the quirky thing they just spotted.

The opening performance this year was by the South African Drum Café, who call themselves South Africa’s premier interactive drumming company.

What is complicated about being the opening act for any event, is that it puts you in the unenviable position of doing three things:

1. Discovering the (unavoidable) technical kinks in the setup
2. Working around them
3. Warming up an audience who for the most part, has just wandered in and has very little idea of what to expect. (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)

If you don’t have a friend in the audience already, there’s no way you’re going to get a good seat. Scratch that. You probably need to have a friend in the organisers to get the good seats. They are the ones in front, cordoned off from us come-lately types. They are the ones where people in crisp suits and smooth sarees sit with legs crossed and inevitably murmur when a performance is on. This is where photographers magically pull out feet long lenses from snazzy little camera pouches and proceed to exhibit them to those who unfortunately stand behind, craning and creeping to somehow catch a glimpse of the stage.

There’s no stepping on to the ampitheatre steps after 5:00pm either. There’s just no space. For 10 minutes, I scout the amoebic periphery of people standing around the stage. For the remaining 10 minutes (It’s a 20 minute performance, I realise too late), I decide to give up the quest for standing space or a better view - and am utterly and helplessly transfixed.

Chase Entertainment presents ‘Dazzlers’, an amalgamation of seven dance styles.

Wearing the colours of the rainbow, seven dancers interpret an expansive range of music using seven different styles of dancing. They perform individually, in apparently mismatched pairs, and then together as one mismatched unit in perfect step. The effect is astounding. The crowd goes wild. Every pause in the music sequence draws hoots, cheers and applause from the audience.

The performance ends too soon, and the crowd begins to disperse. Overheard among them is a wide-eyed young man explaining to his friend:
“Dude, see? Those are legs worth watching. Ballet, man. No more Surya TV.”

Appreciation of art can take many forms, it seems.

Kala Ghoda Arts Festival ‘09.

The Avant-Garde movie screenings at Gallery Beyond ended twenty minutes early in spite of the organizers thankfully repeating the first two movies by Man Ray which I’d missed on account of being late. I rushed to Eros to catch Bow Barracks Forever; expectedly I was told that the Preview Theatre was filled to capacity. I took a ride back to Kala Ghoda thinking I might have missed the Kathak performance, but might as well drink in on the later performances.

I arrived halfway through the Odissi performance by Ms. Sujata Mohapatra. It was the first classical performance I saw being held in an open-air theatre, so I had my reservations. But Mohapatra’s excellent performance soon dispelled all of them.

Wearing the white raiment and adornments of an Odissi dancer, she might as well have personified the quality of purity. Her dance was one energetic, controlled expression of sublime artistry; her countenance and hands in perfect tandem with the moods of the song being sung.

The music too was splendid, especially the mellifluous vocals (I think it was Bengali/Oriya folk though I’m not quite sure) and the mesmerizing violin and flute whose flourishes were as brilliant as the lithe movements of the dancer’s hands.
(Click here to read the whole post)

On an apparently slow Sunday afternoon at the Festival, we — meaning the wife, our nearly-four-year-old and me — were the attraction for a reasonable crowd at the amphitheatre. It went like this: they were playing rocking Bollywood tunes, but they had nobody on stage to dance to them. I don’t know if this was a planned gap in the performance schedule, or if the performers for that slot decided to stay home. Either way, the two young emcees on stage wandered about, pleading into their mikes for people from the audience to climb up and dance. “The best dancer will win a prize!” they said.

Eventually, a slender young man in a maroon T-shirt and glasses leaped up. Handed over his glasses and began srutting about, pointing periodically up at the trees and sky, once falling onto his back and pointing from there. Yet it was all in time to the music, strangely graceful, and refreshingly different from typical Bollywood dancing.

Five or six more young men — only men — flooded on, some of them clearly trained and accomplished gyrators. But the most endearing was a thirty-something man with a thick moustache and a definite belly, moving about the stage, shaking an arm, shaking a leg, with abandon. When the song was done, everyone jumped off the stage, except him. He commandeered a mike and told us all: “I’m just an ordinary engineer! I just got up here to express myself! You all should come up and express yourself too!”
(Click here to read the whole post)

The Tibet India Foundation has a long association with the Kala Ghoda Festival. After keeping visitors hooked last year, they came in this year with what seemed like’Tibetian Opera’.

On a nice winter’s day in Mumbai, with crowds bustling in and around the KG venue, the amphitheater was packed,

(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.

they say you cannot master an art form such dance without becoming a slave to it first. the gotipua tradition is something akin to devotion to their art.

devotion? yes, gotipuas dance like radha to her krishna, shakti to her shiva…and there’s as much love on the stage as there is expressed in the music that accompanies the gotipuas.

now a bit of the background. the gotipuas have dedicated their life to learn the nuances and the many moves of the odissi form of classical dance. they start as young as four and five, and stay at the guru’s home to learn, when they hit puberty, dancers leave to pursue Odissi with other masters or stay on at the guru’s house or further instruction.

the group came on to the stage, and electrified everyone present.

they jumped and they twirled, they even formed human pyramids…they brought so much energy to the stage even i was compelled to stay and watch.

dressed in identical sarees these little dancers from orissa performed wonderfully the tales of krishna and the gopis. so skilful and acrobatci their performance was, i wondered very idly, if they were more gymnasts than dancers. how could anyone bend and twist that way?

of course i dropped the kulfi i was happily enjoying whn i heard that the gotipuas are all boys! the gestures, the dance movements were all so graceful, no one could’ve guessed.

oh i do have a bone to pick about the songs that were being sung with the dances. shudder! so raucous! but i confess i do ot understand folk art as much as i should.

the boys looked so happy dancing, dressed in sarees that i forgot all about the unkind word ‘drag’ that did pop into my pani-puri addled brain.

also must beg for forgiveness for not havig posted this earlier. as my new avatar of publisher of the Caferati ‘Stories at the Coffee Table’, i got busy, dodging cops who wagged their truncheons at me for trying to sell the book from the boot of the car. also, please watch out for several nubile nymphets ‘psssting’ you and then directing you to the aforementioned car.

:)

At every moment in our lives, perhaps, we are to some extent actors, or performers, as well as spectators. When performers and spectators “connect” it creates a very special quality of theater that both transports and transforms all those involved. In India we cherish this strong link between reality and fantasy first through theatre and now through film. All this age old mimicry of life somehow affects us and in return this mimicry is in itself a self-definition of the society we live in. This is what I love about the medium that through a little imagination and snap of a finger we are somewhere else. Taking it a step further many forms of classical dance in India imbibes the same values of theatre mixing them till we get operaish dance put to music.

Yakshagana is one such dance opera I got the opportunity to see at KalaGhoda yesterday. The dance is usually described as folk but this theatre form from Karnataka, the Yakshagana or the song of the celestials has strong classical undertones. Hardly surprising because the dance was born from the Bhakti movement and was designed to bring classical dance beyond its then traditional elitist audience. As the dance unfolded at the Rampant row amphitheatre it raptured the much of the onlookers with its singing and drumming blended with dancing and the quaint endearing kannada dialogues from players, clad in striking costumes in myriad hues and sizes, provided for a very pleasant afternoon.

I was still curious and wanted to learn more may be exchange a conversation with the artists so I some how evaded the Kala Ghoda event staff and went back stage. This is what I saw - A corner clothesline overflows with hair switches, tassels, garlands and `jewels.’ The dim walls are agleam with bright headgear, chest and shoulder armour and the shelves packed with ornaments and anklets. The table is a mass of crushed and ironed costumes. There sat Rakshasha, or a man dressed as one, in front of pictures of an entire pantheon of gods praying; an antithesis if I ever saw one. Very soon I found myself sharing a chai with large men with painted faces and even larger pagades, (a type of head gear) talking about cricket before their next act began.

If there’s one thing that I don’t like about the Kala Ghoda festival, it’s that it makes me wish I could be at three different places at the same time. For the last two days I’ve been running from one program to another, usually arriving sometime mid-way between the second show which usually leaves me desperately craning my neck and standing on my toes so that I can see over the heads of the crowds. It usually doesn’t help.

(Note to self: Grow taller)

But really, I found myself wishing that there could be some way to stop the tallest people from standing right in front of the stage and leaving all the poor vertically challenged souls (like me) with only a partial view of the stage, and cursing their VC genes. Wouldn’t it be great if seating were determined by height? So if you were over six feet tall and wearing headgear which added another foot to your height, you would sit in the back row and yet, have the perfect view of the stage because only shorter people would be allowed to sit in front of you. See? That way everybody’s happy!

Coming back to the performances.

I reached the amphitheatre about mid-way through the Odissi recital by Jhelum Paranjpe and her troupe, and until it struck me that I could actually climb up the steps of the amphitheatre, I watched about five minutes of six pieces of elaborate headgear bob up, down and sideways all together.

When wisdom and a better view dawned, I came to the conclusion that Odissi is such a pretty dance form - all feminity and coy smiles and sweetness and light. Which might probably explain why the sight of the two male dancers in that group of women, disturbed me on a very fundamental level. Oh they were good – performing all the abhinaya and the mudras and the curvaceous movements with practiced ease - no doubt about it, but it was just a *little* disconcerting to see them dance the exact same steps as all the female dancers and with the same amount of…feminity?

The Dasavatar (ten incarnations of Vishnu) piece that they - the three male dancers - performed towards the end dispelled all my ignorant notions of how Odissi was a purely feminine dance form. Those men displayed energy, and effervesence and grace and there was nothing feminine about it. They were marvelous as they went from Matsya through to Varaha, playful as Krishna, serene as Buddha and downright frightening as Narasimha.

Jhelum then performed a solo on a hymn by Salbeg - a Muslim poet who worshipped a Hindu god – and it was beautifully done. Jhelum was graceful and wonderfully emotive as she acted out the pain of the poet, who was not allowed to worship at the temple because he was a Muslim, and how he longed for his lord to grant him deliverance from his crippled earthly body.

The last performance was a pure dance piece titled Moksha, in which all the dancers performed. It was an awesome sight to see as ten pairs of ghungroo-laden feet danced, ten wrists delicately bent and ten heads gracefully swayed along with the music in perfect unison.

So much prettiness!

I think I shall now have a perfectly legitimate grudge against my parents for a) never sending me to any dance classes and b) passing on the vertically-challenged gene to the sole family member who could’ve done without it.

Bright golden sequinned suits, colorful little saris wrapped fisherwoman style, spotless white kurta pyjamas soon to remain not-so-spotless, tiny birdies wearing pink, yellow and blue birdie dresses. The dance organized by NGOs with kids performing to Bollywood numbers on Sunday morning was easily the event I loved best among those I caught over the weekend. Crowds clapping and cheering, the kids on stage having a blast, their bright smiles outshining the miidday sun high above, spectators, among them some kids who were waiting for their turn to perform on stage watching open-mouthed, the NGO volunteers notepad in hand, steering the kids to the right place at the right time…

The show which went on for over an hour had these little kids dancing to popular Bollywood numbers starting with suno gaur se duniya walon. The kids came on stage, danced the way to an encore, followed by dus bahane and rang de basanti and more.

It is obvious that nothing captivates the attention of the audience as Bollywood - people stood in front of the stage trhough the performance and clapped themselves hoarse. The earlier evening at Horniman Gaden, just before Sonal Mansingh’s performance was to begin, a cop on duty came up to me (I was of course, standing row 1-plus, camera in hand) and asked me, ab kya honey wala hai? koi sonal woh naachne ali hai kya? (what’s up? is some sonal to dance now?) And that morning, before this dance, I walked into the museum gallery looking for the Jayateerth Mevundi concert - I had been waiting near the ampitheatre by mistake. Seeing the small room almost full, I asked a mother-son duo sitting at the back, is this the JM concert? Son ignored me and continued to paly with his mobile while Mother gave me a blank look and said - I don’t know - we are just sitting here because something is going to happen, so many people here. But Bollywood, never a vague “something is going to happen” - familiar, popular - you can never go wrong with Bollywood.

Dus bahane karke le gaya dil

The last perormance was the everpopular birdie dance - the stage a riot of colors, little birdies wriggling and jumping, sometimes performing with complete confidence, sometimes taking sneak peaks at each other in confusion - what is the next step now?

the birdie dance

a quick pose in the middle of dance

“We were given the choice of performing at the amphitheatre as well, but we wanted to recreate the atmosphere of the royal court of Wajid Ali Shah, which is where these two art forms – Thumri and Kathak – came into being.”

It is rare to find an artist who can not only convey her love and mastery of her art to the audience, but also make them fall in love with it. It is rarer to find two such artists and even rarer to find them amicably sharing a stage.

But that is what we witnessed at the Kathak–Thumri Milap at the NGMA auditorium today evening. Almost two full hours of enthralling music and scintillating dance. Dhanashree Pandit reminded me so much of those too rare teachers and professors, who made their classes so interesting that you’d actually bunk bunking to attend them. She didn’t just sing those thumris, she owned them – playing them out slowly at first, like kite-string, pulling, releasing, teasing and then… setting them free to fly.

And really, it was an education. For someone whose only talent (as far as Hindustani classical music goes) is being able to differentiate a Des from a Bhairav, I came away from that performance feeling like I had taans and aalaaps sloshing out of my ears (in the nicest way possible). I came away wanting to dedicate my life (or what is left of it) to music! And dance! And glory to the performing arts!

But coming back to real life.

Dhanashree began the show with an introduction to the basic thumri. She explained the birth of the thumri as a counter-development to the more complex and sophisticated khayals of the period. How folk songs from UP made their way into the Mughal courts, where they were cleaned-up, polished, decorated with Urdu words and finally presented as graceful thumris.

Thumri and kathak are apparently sister art-forms, both having originated under the patronage of Wajid Ali Shah. The word thumri itself, has its origins in dance - ‘thum’ being a bol used in kathak and ‘ri’ from the Hindi word rijhana (to please).

The pieces were presented as interactions between the dancer and the musicians - Dhanashree would sing a piece with Keka performing it simultaneously. Watching this interaction on stage was truly awe-inspiring because it seemed that they never needed to speak to each other, like they had this secret language between them which made words absolutely unnecessary. Keka would simply nod at the tabla-player and in the next second the auditorium would resonate with frantic-but-perfectly-in-sync activity from all the four people on that stage.

Keka Sinha was fascinating as she swayed, pirouetted and acted out the thumri themes one after the other. Whether they were the Radha-Krishna stories or the depiction of the eight nayikas*, she was marvelously convincing in all of them.

At the end of this wonderful, wonderful evening, all I can say is thank God for Wajid Ali Shah!

*Classical heroines of the ancient scriptures of dance.

They plucked out flowers out of thin air, called stars and commanded them to twinkle. They summoned oceans and made them dance, made rain without a single cloud.
These were no dancers, these were conjurors.

So if dance is poetry in motion, what is poetry interpreted through dance?

I watched Kolkata-based dancer Vandana Hazra and her troupe perform today and while I didn’t exactly find an answer to the above question, I came away dazzled.

I’m not very familiar with Rabindranath Tagore’s work, or Bharatnatyam, or Chau for that matter, but I know magic when I see it and what I saw on stage today was *it*. Now I know that dancers are supposed to own the space around them but these ones? They left no space. Every inch of that stage was filled with flowers, forests, stars, rain, rivers…and all of it created in seconds out of gestures and thin air. A delicate flick of a wrist made a raindrop, fingers unfurled into blossoming flowers; arms melted into fluid wavelets and waists into riverbends.

It was like watching a poem come to life.

Most pieces began with Vandana translating the poems into English for the mostly non-Bengali audience. The musicians would then take it up and Vandana would either perform solo, or with one other dancer. The performances were mostly Bharatnatyam but the poems which contained characters in conflict, had a combination of Bharatnatyam and Chau.

And it was in these pieces that the difference between the two forms was most stark – Bharatnatyam is all grace and delicacy and form, and Chau is all movement and energy and balance. The choreography was aptly done, in that, all the strong moving characters like rivers and storms were executed in Chau, and all the softer, earthier characters were in Bharatnatyam (that Chau dancer floated around on stage like she had never heard of that silly little thing called gravity, or bones for that matter!).

It was amazing to see how two distinct forms of expression could come together so flawlessly on one stage, but maybe that was the whole show was about - blurring the boundaries between poetry, music, dance, and magic.

Tibetans believe you dance to eliminate negativity, to cut through the ego and to bring in auspicious circumstances. Hence, I could think of no better way to start my escapades at the Kala Ghoda Art festival than to watch the cries of Snow Lions. The Snow lion is a blundering beast in cheerful white demeanour that symbolizes the fearless and elegant quality of the enlightened mind. When a healthy and harmonious environment is established by the creative activities of human beings, such as through the performance of sacred purification and healing music, all living beings, here represented by the snow lion, rejoice. Rejoice we did as the snow lions with big golden eyes and large masses of yak like fur paraded through Rampart Row to the beat of a Tibetan drum much to delight of the children watching.

The festivities moved to the Amphitheatre. Seven dancers paraded before us : four in red and three in black and white. The dance itself was a blend of lumbering grace- the dancers hopped on one leg with the other raised in a flexed foot, with turns added to the hops. Drums rang on, marked with more acrobatics arm swoops and torso rotating as well as frou frou of skirts as the women swirled to the enchanting sounds of Tibet. The next three dancers with porcelain faces and ornately brocaded costumes were identified with the visualizations of common men, each dancer danced with a light spring, shifting weight, hopping in half turns. To say the dancers looked like magical beings would not have been inaccurate. The dance ended with a grand finale and the dancers exited to the sound of applause from the crowds. A brief pause before we were yet again graced by a pair of Snow Lions on the stage to end what was a memorable piece of Tibet at Kala Ghoda.

This is why I have come to love this festival so much, it seems to transport to you other places and times, a window to many forms of art and culture and all in your very own city.

I went to Kala Ghoda in severe conflict about what to see and what to do. This was one of the time when you feel like having a few clones and catch the whole show. But friend Ajita won, and we headed for Horniman Circle gardens to attend Sonal Mansingh’s Odissi performance.
The evening was cool and breezy, the gardens were filling up fast. We could see the patron Goddesses of the event, Brinda Miller, Devika Bhojwani and Sarayu Doshi flitting around, getting show started.
The ceremonial Lamp refused to stay lit. Finally the lamp was announced as “lit” behind the shelter of a file, and the show started. And what a show it was!
I was all prepared to give a nod to Culture and then rush over to watch Soparkar’s Troup “Dancing in the streets “. But that was only till Sonal started her first piece, devoted to Goddess Maatangi, the patron goddess of all arts. From now on “Bhavani Dayani” will always look like Sonal.
There was something of a Sybil in her whole persona. Her goddess was not an ethereal being, soft and delicate. She was ageless, wise, compassionate, wrathful, powerful and sexy. A Mother personified every which way. She could vanquish the demons, and lift the mountain. The music, the shadows and Sonal’s body language, all added to the effect. I went ahead to sit on the ground right in front of the stage, catching every nuance every expression emanated by Sonal.
Some one had once told me that to understand space one must learn to dance. It wasn’t quite clear to me, till I watched her dance. Spaces kept shifting and changing as a pint size Waman, grew up to cover the earth and the sky in two steps and she effortlessly covered the entire stage.
Sonal took us through the age old stories of Krishna Leela and Geet Govindam. But for me the show had ended with Sonal as the Goddess Maatangi / Durga.

Crossposted here