CHENNAI: Using art to bring people divided by caste, class, and religious lines together is not new to Chennai. Classical art forms have been on stage with non-classical ones, and while some are embracing this as a new culture, some others think of it as ‘untraditional’. Phani Kumar, a 32-year-old hip-hop dancer, and DJ who participated at the Urur Olcott Kuppam Vizha recently, believes there is no good or bad in all of this. He says, “It’s simply about being exposed to different art forms at the same time, and watching a conversation get started.”
To keep the hip-hop scene in the city upbeat, Phani founded Catalyst 28 in 2009. The dance company with its crew of hip-hop dancers, graffiti artists, b-boying dancers, and rappers organise dance festivals and competitions in the city. “When there’s a festival, I just have to drop them a message. They leave their work and get together because cyphers and competitions matter that much to all of us,” he adds.
Coming from a family of Carnatic musicians and Bharatanatyam dancers, he teaches hip-hop at studios in the city by day, and is a DJ by night. “Children from poor economic backgrounds can’t afford studios and international schools where hip-hop is taught. Very few girls sustain through years of training, and parents are hesitant to send them to festivals. On the other side, you won’t find upper-class kids from studios coming to the vizha,” he shares.
“After the performance at the vizha, kids approach us to train them. That’s the aim of the vizha — to expose these kids to dance forms that would, otherwise, be unavailable to them.”
Other than 20 hip-hop dancers and graffiti artists from around the city, Phani’s cipher at the vizha saw both trained and untrained children from middle-income groups around Kuppam, participate. “We gave the kids here a new line of interest. There were no rules. And some who were skilled, we are hoping, will come to us later for classes,” he shares.
It hasn’t been easy though. When Phani began in 2009, there were no collective hip-hop fests in the city. “No one saw that hip-hop can break barriers and allow people to express anything, in any language they wanted. Only now, you slowly see Tamil rappers coming up,” he points out. Over these years, he has participated in Battle of the Year, and Asian Battle Fest, and has also organised Indian hip-hop fest, and Chennai Street Festival.
But can a hip-hop festival be a political tool in the way that a Carnatic music concert cannot? Phani says, “Both yes and no. Hip-hop across the world is a better political tool. If we have concerns, we can express it by writing on the wall like graffiti, by rapping about it or simply through dance. It’s easily accessible and more effective. But in a place like the vizha, by simply bringing Carnatic to a different audience, the language changes. It becomes political.”
His idea for next year’s vizha is to organise a hip-hop dance theatre with classical music on stage. “That way, Carnatic and hip-hop will be on stage at the same time. People might love it, or hate it. But unless we try, how will we know?” he shares “If these experiments weren’t working, we wouldn’t have seen the festival grow so much in these last four years.”