The Park's New Festival 2013: Some reflections on the Mumbai edition of the festival

The Park's New Festival envisioned by the Prakriti Foundation in Chennai is committed to showcasing emerging and new work from India. It is also the only festival of its kind in India currently. Founder-Trustee Ranvir Shah who leads the Prakriti Foundation, is not only responsible for the artistic vision behind the festival but is also involved at all levels of organisation that make such festivals possible. He is a connoisseur of the Arts and believes that they must be supported. His passion for the Arts is only strengthened by his Gujju genes and he is therefore sharp and enterprising too. After all, festivals like these need a lot of funds and partnerships. In this endeavour, he is greatly supported by his sincere and able administrator Meera Krishnan. The Prakriti Foundation runs a number of festivals and events through the year, but its Park New Festival in collaboration with the festival's main benefactor- The Park Group of Hotels, is by far the most exciting.

The Park's New Festival has successfully completed seven years and has moved beyond its home city Chennai to other significant metros such as Bangalore, Delhi, Hyderabad and Mumbai. The UK based choreographer and dancer Akram Khan, the Tamilian-Sri Lankan-American artiste D'Lo and the American musician and You Tube sensation Shankar Tucker performed at the first edition of the festival in Mumbai last year. It was something. D'Lo was terrific and the celebrated Akram Khan made quite an impression. Going by the crowd that turned up, Tucker and his band proved that they indeed were very popular. This year too, three select performances were staged. Amit Chaudhuri's 'A Moment of Mishearing' was staged at the Blue Frog while Stray Factory's theatre shorts and Deepak Kurki Shivaswamy's contemporary dance performance titled NH7 were staged at the NCPA from September 10-12 2013.

Winner of the Commonwealth Writers Prize among other awards, Amit Chaudhuri's show 'A Moment of Mishearing' combines music with an audio-visual narrative. Amit Chaudhuri, more recently in the news for his latest book on Kolkata (Calcutta: Two Years in the City), is also a musician who draws upon the various influences that different kinds of music have had on him since his childhood. The show's video narrates his musical autobiography in his voice. The video is punctuated by the songs he presents with his band. Musicians generally are known to perform their music more and to talk less. In between songs they may reveal a little about themselves but it is ultimately their music that matters.

In Amit Chaudhuri's show, it's the reverse. We get to hear a lot from Amit Chaudhuri about his discovery of different types of music and of how he found associations with the different melodies through his own training in Hindustani classical music and his teenage experiments with Western pop and rock. The film narrative is introspective, self-mocking and even charming as Amit makes no bones about his privileged upbringing. Some of the imagery goes well with the songs that are presented, but it is also indulgent. As the songs progress, the film appears to be overstating its core text about influences and inspirations. Musicians have for ever been influenced by musical genres besides their own and some of the best musicians have integrated different styles into their own music. Finally, it's about the individual and unique sound that the musician is able to create. If we are to forego Amit Chaudhuri's video with its literary words and concentrate on his music, there is promise in the opening songs, some of it is nice but most of it, passable and even a tad repetitive. Talk does not quite correspond with the action. The show has very competent trappings but it is not impressive. Ultimately it depends on how you view the show. For me, since Amit Chaudhuri is the musician in the show, his music came first.

A couple of years ago, the Australian Short + Sweet franchise found its way to India. Since then theatre groups have found a great way to get the young and the restless into the theatre. Most of us are familiar with skits and it's likely that at some point in time in our school and college days, we have experienced them. The Short + Sweet plays could be described as the cool and hip version of the humble skit. Arguably shorter than the average skit, the standard Short + Sweet play should not exceed 10 minutes on stage. It was at the Short + Sweet festival that Stray Factory, a Chennai-based theatre group, became popular. It now has an entire show of its own that stages five shorts. Perhaps a little over 10 minutes each, the five plays with their distinct themes have one thing in common- they all punch in an act. Stray Factory's actors are all young professionals in different careers, some of them at the crossroads of theatre and film. The founder of their group Mathivanan Rajendran (he has earlier been interviewed by our website) is an Industrial Engineer by education. His play MY NAME IS CINEMA was a hit at the Short + Sweet festival in Chennai and in Mumbai and is part of this production titled OSAMA, CINEMA AND A WHOLE LOT OF BLACK MAGIC.

The shorts which range from an actor's audition to a magician reminiscing his father are sharp but not incisive. They are clever but glib. The satirical bits work well though; the humour is telling and the actors are uniformly good, some of them showing flashes of brilliance. Venkatesh Harinathan is one of them. Among the five shorts I especially liked CHAIRPERSONS, written and directed by Rajiv Rajaram. Here, the satire was spot-on and it fulfilled its short trajectory theatrically too. The Stray Factory, as Ranvir Shah observed rightly, is not about to shed off its South-Indian roots; in fact the group celebrates them, and this certainly gives them an edge over other kinds of urban English theatre that are not rooted in their context owing to fundamental problems of language and accent. Yet Stray Factory is young and impressionable. Its content going by this production, is successful because it is, to use a cliche, hitting the right buttons. To create a more lasting impression however, it needs to tell more challenging and gripping tales.

The third and the last show that was presented at this year's Mumbai edition of the festival was Deepak Kurki Shivaswamy's (whom we also interviewed) NH7.  A highlight of this production was that it had received the PECDA award (Prakriti Excellence in Contemporary Dance Awards) and this enabled Deepak and his team to work on the production for a year.  This contemporary dance performance which Deepak has choreographed and in which he participates along with co-dancers Charan CS and Amaresha Kempanna is a reflection of some of the best work happening in its field in India today. Contemporary dance can be many things and it is best defined or explained from performance to performance rather than as a category. But its singular challenge and initiative perhaps lies in its ability to surprise- to tell us and show us what dance/movement is capable of. Deepak Kurki Shivaswamy's NH7 fulfills this core criterion.

NH7 dwells on the experience of the migrant worker in a big city rapidly moving towards urbanization. Deepak and his co-actors present a series of scenes in which movement creates dramatic compositions. The movement is not stylized but rather comes across as a natural outcome of the feelings and the emotion the performers want to convey. It is both dance and drama at the same time and yet retains its impulse in movement throughout. But as it continues to score on the physicality and rhythm of its theme, the narrative guiding it begins to appear more and more one-sided, which also results in unnecessary repetition and prolonged scenes. This narrative is about industrialization (read capitalism) and the exploitation of the labourer. This aspect gets more fully realized when the three dancers change to wearing shirts, trousers and shiny boots, one of them becoming the slick executive wielding a beer can. A simplistic reading would be that the oppressed have now transformed into the oppressor. The moot problem is that this narrative is flawed and is out of date. There is no doubt about the exploitation that continues to take place at the hands of those who call the shots but the form and nature of exploitation vary and cannot be read out of context, and nor can it be reduced to a moralistic tale. If indeed we need to have a dialogue about this and if Art is one way to do it then it must go beyond the obvious and further its inquiry.

The production can also do with some thoughtful editing. When a point is made, it must have a good reason to be repeated or over-emphasized. These philosophical problems apart, the three dancers are very good and demonstrate what contemporary dance is capable of. Charan CS among the three performers stands out for the fluidity he brings to his movements. The sound design by Abhijeet Tambe and Manu Shrivastava is a patchwork of music and sounds creating the desired effect. The sound design underscores the monotony and the claustrophobia in an urban environment. The NH7 in the title of the production is symbolic of the new infrastructure sprouting in India and it is in that sense a tribute by way of dance to the migrant labourer that makes these super highways possible.

*Deepa Punjani is the Editor of this website.