The Chennai-based Prakriti Foundation presents the 7th edition of The Park's New Festival 2013. The much awaited festival starts this August from Chennai and will travel to five other cities, namely Bangalore, Hyderabad, Mumbai, Delhi and Kolkata.

The Park's New Festival showcases the cutting edge in contemporary performing and visual arts, by artists from around the world. It is one of the main festivals that the Prakriti Foundation organizes annually. This is the only national contemporary performance arts festival in India.

With the promise of promoting local and global talent, this year's powerful line-up includes compelling performances by artists like Amit Chaudhuri, Deepak Kurki Shivaswamy, and from groups and organisations like Stray Factory and Attakalari.

Speaking on the occasion, Ms. Priya Paul (Chairperson, Apeejay Surrendra Park Hotels Ltd.) said, "India has a rich heritage that boasts of cultural endowments and an emerging art scenario. In keeping with our commitment to promote contemporary art and culture, The Park Hotels is back with the seventh edition of The Park's New Festival. This year, the platform will be open for both international and local artists who will present excellent pieces of engaging acts."

Adds Ranvir Shah (Founder - Prakriti Foundation and the curator of the festival), "The Park's New Festival is a torch bearer of the performance arts festivals in India since its inception in 2008. The festival brings together international and local artists at a world class forum to celebrate art, expression, creativity and culture."

About the performances and the performers (Mumbai schedule):

• 'A Moment of Mishearing' - a full concert with film and audio: a mixed-media musical essay that marries Indian music with the blues, jazz, and Western pop classics.'
  
  A major highlight of the festival will be Amit Chadhuri's 'A Moment of Mishearing,' an audio-visual narrative and a receiver of the Arts award from the Arts Council of England. The narrative will weave in a full concert performance, about Amit Chaudhuri's music project, which began when he began to 'mishear' the raga in the blues and vice versa, and 'misheard', one morning as he was practicing classical music, the riff to Eric Clapton's 'Layla' in the raga Todi. A Moment of Mishearing is written by Amit Chaudhuri, and performed by him and the Amit Chaudhuri band. It is produced by Roger James Elsgood. The radio version was first broadcast on BBC Radio 3 in 2010, and again on Christmas Eve 2011.'
  
  Amit Chaudhuri is 'one of the leading writers of his generation' (Guardian). He has written and published five novels, three works of non-fiction, including his latest book, the acclaimed Calcutta: Two Years in the City, a volume of poetry, and he is the editor of the Picador Book of Modern Indian Literature. His literary work has won major awards in Britain, the USA and India, including the Commonwealth Writers Prize, the Society of Authors' Betty Trask Prize for Best First Novel, the Society of Authors' Encore Prize for Best Second Novel, the Los Angeles Times Book Prize, and the Sahitya Akademi Prize. In 2013, he was awarded the first Infosys Prize for the Humanities for his outstanding contribution to Literary Studies. He is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature, Professor of Contemporary Literature at the University of East Anglia, and a former judge of the Man Booker International Prize.
  
  He is also a 'pathbreaking musician' (Independent). A guitarist and singer in the Western popular style as a teenager in Bombay, he began to learn Hindustani classical music and the khayal from the late Pandit Govind Prasad Jaipurwale of the Kunwar Shyam gharana when he was sixteen, in 1978. Both aspects of his musical lineage came together in his experimental project in 2004, which he first entitled 'This Is Not Fusion', and whose story is narrated, and repertoire performed, in 'A Moment of Mishearing'.



• NH7 "a contemporary dance work" by Deepak Kurki Shivaswamy is strongly driven by the new phenomena of immigration of the rural population to urban spaces in search of 'better life,' and their reality. The piece depicts the intricate, confused, rapid urbanization of India. It vividly captures the mad need to build, demolish, and re-imagine the city. It explores how people, workers and individuals are caught in this mayhem and maze of bricks, bridges, construction sites and dust. The work aims at creating moving images with bodies which will reflect the current imagination of the city and the changing landscape in India.
  
  This project was started in July 2012, by the artists of The KHA Foundation (a non-profit art organisation), a collective based in Bangalore, and is dedicated to promoting movement arts, performance, music and design by engaging in art experiments, training and performances. In August 2012 the work and the artists involved were recognised at the Prakriti Excellence in Contemporary Dance Awards (PECDA) as one of India's upcoming artists and were awarded funding to develop the work and were also mentored by the Akram Khan Dance Company.



• OSAMA, CINEMA AND A WHOLE LOT OF BLACK MONEY:
  
  The show features the best of Stray Factory's award winning short plays which have been performed across the globe. Over the course of the one hour performance the audience will journey with the unlikeliest of characters and places ranging from cinematic villages, balloon popping politicians, narcissistic actors and omnipresent magicians.
  
  They've tried hard to stitch a theme across but they are just a little too.... Stray?. They take great pride in bringing to you what brought them closer to each other as performers and people. They have been performed across the country, Singapore, Kuala Lumpur, Sydney, Auckland and Dubai but they have never been presented in a single evening, until now.
  
  Stray Factory is an entertainment collaborative which focuses on performance art and dabbles in film/video production. The biggest focus of their collaborative is to perform original content and to go 'Glo-cal' - travelling globally with local content. In addition to this, they want to continue collaborating with like-minded artists across the globe and keep producing exciting content. Over the last three years they have performed over 20 pieces in more than 30 venues spread out over 5 countries, including Australia, Dubai and Malaysia. Stray Factory premiered its full length 'My Name is Cine-maa' in Singapore in August this year.