What would a soundscape of Goa be like? The crashing of waves on the shore, musical reverberations from food shacks, street-market bustle, the quietitude of its beaches in the south, and the perpetually happy chatter of tourists. This unique melody of the state was infused with a sonorous burst last week with the Serendipity Arts Festival.
There was the meditative lull of the potter’s wheel, the sizzle of a freshly made surnali dosa and the vibrations of a sliding guitar against the evening river breeze. There were also the troughs of a storyteller’s recitation, the static of anxiety and the silences of memories. In its sixth physical edition, the multi-disciplinary arts festival, which featured over 300 artists across 150 events, tapped into the sounds of the past, present and future to filter out the noise and redirect attention to the overlooked and forgotten.
Nature Cry
Away from the traffic-packed streets of Panjim, tucked away in a narrow back alley is the Old PWD Complex, which houses what is the loudest—in essence—show at the festival. Simply put, the exhibition, titled Time as Mother, featuring works of seven Indian and European artists, reiterates the need to take the environmental crisis seriously. “The works use time-based media to create a multifaceted space of film, poetry and text, sound and narratives, to explore organic and inorganic worldmaking through time, but also the multiplicity of relationships unfolding between the human and more-than-human, their different temporalities and overlapping co-existences,” said Ravi Aggarwal and Damian Christinger in their curatorial note.
Among the most striking pieces is Swiss artist Ursula Biemann’s ‘Forest Mind’a video installation that is the outcome of her continued interaction over the years with the Inca community of the forests in Colombia. It captures the tribals talking about why their forests hold a godly place in their lives. They speak about folktales, their personal journeys and how the wilderness is their protector. They also talk about the gradual erosion of their homes.
Biemann juxtaposes the spiritual perspective of the Inca tribe with scientific algorithms, which establish the intelligence of plants and trees. The latter is depicted with a projection on the floor of plant DNA diagrams. In an act of memorialising, the artist covers the wall next to the video with a circle made out of paint containing the DNA of the Amazonian rainforest. “The DNA is the composite of a sound recording, a photograph and a living seed from the indigenous territory. Mixed into the first layer of paint, they will be forever inscribed in the archeology of these heritage walls,” she writes.
Clayfully Crafted
You can hear the whirl of the potter’s wheel before you see artiste Vidya Thirunarayan perched atop a platform deftly moulding clay. She is Meena, a kiln worker, who had been living her drudgery of a life one day at a time, barely managing to scrape through. That is, until she found an abandoned infant in a clay pot. She takes her home, and before she realises, she becomes a mother. As Vidya climbs up and down the platform during the performance, Lives of Clay, beating and shaping clay that lay on the ground, viewers see her daughter grow up, one muddy lump at a time.
The mother and daughter only have each other, but that seems enough. Vidya is also Parvati; again at work at the wheel, with her husband, Shiva, away meditating in Mount Kailash. As she adds ghee to the clay, a mud ball rolls on to the ground and comes to life, transforming into a young boy. Parvati has birthed Ganesha, and her ecstasy finds expression in the spring in Vidya’s step as she decks up the space with colourful streamers. Life is joyful for both the mothers, but soon Vidya’s face sombres, and the music turns menacing.
Meena has taken her daughter to the kiln. The child plays around while her mother works, before disappearing from the latter’s line of sight, and getting engulfed by the fire of the kiln. Meena’s pain finds resonance in Parvati’s fury at discovering a bleeding Ganesha, beheaded by an annoyed Shiva, both depicted in Vidya’s rapid movements. “The performance spins together narratives of ancient myth, harsh reality and intimate truth,” says curator Quasar Thakore Padamsee. A mother is a mother, whether in heaven or on earth.
Rustic Rhythms
In a performance, titled Manthan, theatre artiste Akshay Gandhi breathes fresh life into the 400-year-old storytelling tradition of Kaavad Katha. Indigenous to Rajasthan, the art form, which combines poetry, mythology and music, sees the narrator use a wooden box—kaavad—which unravels like a Pandora’s Box with intricately designed paintings as the story progresses. As he begins his performance in the makeshift, pitch-dark space, a shadow of a female figure appears from the other end of the room, trying to follow the pauses of Gandhi’s narration.
Except that his rustic rhythm is punctuated not by the usual accompaniments of an ektara or a sarangi, but the sharp tunes of Carnatic music and tinkling of the ghungroos around the ankles of Mohiniyattam dancer Divya Warier. The performers enact the legend of Mohini from the Hindu mythology (where Lord Vishnu takes the form of a goddess to help the devas during the churning of the sea) transporting viewers into a fantastical world.
True to its title, the performance is a confluence—of north and south, of text and music. Mayuri Upadhyay, the curator of the dance segment of the festival, says she decided to commission Manthan after she was raptured by one of Gandhi’s performances. “Getting a dancer on board was not easy. I think it is simply because the two media have different approaches. The oral tradition need not use musicality always. The two also use space and time differently,” she says, adding, “This is the first time that Mohiniyattam is being collaborated with Kaavad Katha. The two of them (Gandhi and Warier) did a lot of research to create an ecosystem of creative minds, which brings out the best in each other and the art forms. It gives fresh expression to our traditions.”
Filter Out the Noise
Artist Avani Tanya wants to separate sound from noise. Her work ‘...and then I overheard’ is a reflection of the thought. Part of the exhibition, Synaesthetic Notations, curated by Veerangana Solanki, the installation placed in a dark room, comprises small ceramic fountain clusters with water flowing through them. The palette is white with splashes of pastel yellows, pinks and blues creating the intended reflective environment to tune out the cacophony.
There seems nothing else to do except get drawn into the silence. “The work invites the viewer to eavesdrop on a clumsy meditation on the saturated nature of our times. The installation considers a chance hearing of what is drowned, is faint, is often distant in a profuse visual and aural landscape—an attunement of when we listen, who we listen to, what speaks and where language can be found,” says the artist. The artwork also compels the viewer to prolong their attention span, something that is only getting shorter by the day. The exercise lets one eliminate the auditory clutter around to focus on the gurgles of the fountain water. “The offering makes space for listening with attention and with care, to hear over the excessive noise of the world,” Avani adds.
Music As We Know It
The joy of familiarity is like no other. It is true of people and places, and of music. Known tunes bring comfort, and have the ability to transport listeners to memorable times. The music segment of the festival this year appears to have been curated by Bickram Ghosh keeping that in mind. The line-up opens with an ensemble performance headlined by Zakir Hussain. Playing to a full house, the tabla maestro displays a show of intricate rhythms, infused with genre-defying improvisations by the likes of Ranjit Barot (drums), Rakesh Chaurasia (flute), Zubin Balaporia (keyboard), Sanjay Divecha (guitar) and Sheldon D’Silva (bass guitar).
While the veterans bring fusion to the stage, the younger lot—Amritanshu Dutta on a 22-string slide guitar, accompanied by Harshit Shankar on flute and Taalanjay Thakur—regale audiences with pure classical tunes against the setting sun during ‘River Raag’. Ghosh says, “It is a fallacy that people no longer listen to or play classical music. That is what I want to show here.” Familiarity reaches its peak with a resounding performance by the indie band Kabir Café, known for their renditions of philosophical couplets written by the 16th-century mystic Kabir.