I am a loner. Most of the nice things I do in life, I do all by myself – attending concerts, exhibitions, watching films, plays, staring at a sunset. I’ve grown to become quite skilled at the art of solitude. I was invited to the 9th edition of the Serendipity Arts Festival this December in Goa, and writing this as I return after spending a few refreshing, rejuvenating days there, I’m wondering why exactly I loved it so much. Of course, I was surrounded by good art in a place like Goa – you might say, what’s not to like? But there’s something more. I decided, after much deliberation, that one of the primary reasons I loved Serendipity in particular, and (rare) spaces like these in general, was because it offered me comfort. In calling it comfort, I keep complacency far, far away from it – for nothing could be more dreadful for artists – but I talk about the comfort in being oneself and expressing oneself. I could be comfortable in my solitude, and the seasoned observer-cum-eavesdropper that I am – watch people make friends, discover art, fall a little in love, dress up the way they want, or – the inevitable – click selfies. A space built for serious art exploration has the ability to pull together a bunch of people who will sign up to be curious, think critically – an activity that not many of us are ready to invest our time in lately. A space where people who are more used to being misunderstood in their everyday lives will finally feel (somewhat) understood for some time, but hopefully without the perils of falling into an echo chamber – because there will always be an equal mix of encouragement and disagreement. Such spaces are essential and powerful. And, like all good things in this world, rare.
Spread over eight days across several venues in the charming city of Panjim in Goa, the Serendipity Arts Festival offered an impressively curated experience for art lovers, with events cut across disciplines – music, dance, photography, painting, food, poetry – and a lot more and everything in between. I spent a little over two days at Serendipity, and constantly felt like splitting myself up into several parts to be present at multiple venues at the same time, for there was so much to do and just not enough time. I still managed to do quite a bit, and have been bursting to tell you about the highlights of my Serendipity experience.
Theatre: Do You Know This Song?
I entered the intimate theatre space of the Kala Academy in Panjim to Mallika Taneja, the performer, director, and writer of the play, arranging rows and rows of dolls on the floor with almost an eerie meticulousness. The same lines of a song kept repeating softly in the background while everyone settled in. The narrative over the next one-and-a-half hours shifted from playful to dark, with a tale of love, loss, grief, and hopelessness. Instead of following a linear storytelling structure, Mallika evoked emotions using music and anecdotes, outlining the life of a woman artist – with her darknesses and insecurities, loneliness and longing in a deeply patriarchal world. In a powerfully intense performance, the viewer and the performer often blurred into one, as Mallika deftly trained her audience to take part in some of the most pivotal and emotionally intense moments during the show. The carefully chosen music, and Mallika’s live renditions of them, too, added a layer of depth to the performance. Rarely have I had the experience of seeing an audience – and being – this shaken and inconsolable as we were after this play.
Workshop: Navarasa Sadhana
The nine fundamental rasas, or emotions, as described in the age-old sage Bharata’s Natya Shastra, continue to be alluded to in contemporary dance practices. Exploring the vast depth of the power that emotions hold over a performer, legendary Kutiyattam exponent G. Venu has been conducting the Navarasa Sadhana workshop across the globe since 2016. G. Venu’s unique methodology, drawn from the texts of the Natya Shastra and the techniques of Kutiyattam, is for performers in theatre and dance and has had over a hundred workshops held till date.
Conducted by G. Venu with short demonstrations by his daughter, dancer Kapila Venu, the one-hour workshop at SAF offered a glimpse of what generally spans over several days. Kapila’s demonstrations of the rasas, performed to drumbeats, used the eyes and facial muscles in Kutiyattam style to capture the intensity of human emotions. The rasas of the Natya Shastra are generally accompanied by a mythological origin story. A workshop on the Navarasas in today’s time transcends these origins, forcing the performer to look within, and attempt to understand their own emotions.
Talk: The Shrinking Space for Writing on the Arts
The arts don’t make headlines anymore. The Arts and Culture column in newspapers and magazines is often an afterthought, which doesn’t seem to require any special skill to cover. The Indian classical musician of today seldom plays to impress the journalist in the front row, for the latter would hardly ever know the difference between a Yaman and a Bageshree. In media, as in society, the arts do not exactly seem to be the first priority.
In a session moderated by Snigdha Hasan (Editor, NCPA ON Stage), Naresh Fernandes (Editor, Scroll) and Suanshu Khurana (Senior Assistant Editor, The Indian Express) sat down to talk about all of this and more. As they spoke about the heydays of performance arts journalism, when names like Shanta Gokhale and Ranjit Hoskote brightened the newsroom, one could visualize the shrinking of the space even more clearly. The discussion also revolved around the onus on the journalist to keep the arts relevant – art is, as it always has been, political, even (and, perhaps, especially) when it specifically tries not to be so. It was interesting to hear veteran journalists talk of reach, engagement, and click-through rates in digital media – alien terms that must be accepted into regular discourse to adapt to changing times.
I took back with me something that Suanshu said – ‘reporting about the world will tell you about the world, reporting about the arts will tell you about yourself.’ A lot of us still wait eagerly to read – about the play we missed last week, the raga we enjoyed but couldn’t grasp the intricacies of. The light flickers on, for the readers and the writers who aren’t ready to give up just yet.
Music: Ragas at sunset and nights for ghazals
I attended two music events at Serendipity, curated by the tabla maestro Bickram Ghosh. A cruise on the Mandovi River with music and the sunset for company, the event River Raag took place every evening on all days of the festival. On the day I attended the event, there was a violin concert by Padma Shankar, with BC Manjunath on the Mridangam. Shankar began her recital with raag Jaganmohini, following up with raag Kanada and a thillana on raag Sindhu Bhairavi. She also played a few popular bhajans for the audience to sing along.
Later in the evening, I went to the Shaam-e-Ghazal concert featuring Pratibha Singh Baghel and Prithvi Gandharv, both stellar performers in their own right. After a long day of being immersed in art, it was a great way to unwind. Both Pratibha and Prithvi stuck to popular tunes, audience favourites that one cannot go wrong with. As a cool late-night breeze blew over the Nagalli hills ground, I sat back and enjoyed, humming to the tunes of Chupke Chupke Raat Din and Ahista Ahista.
Exhibitions and Installations
Early in the morning at Goa’s Excise Building taken over by the Serendipity Arts Festival, I walked into a dimly lit room with an intricate collection of (approximately 600) laboratory glassware held together into a large sphere, suspended mid-air. A voiceover in the background and the text accompanying the installation spoke of the accidental discovery of Prussian blue in the Berlin of 1706. In 1767, it would be found that adding sulphuric acid to the same Prussian blue creates the deadly poison, cyanide – a chemical that would eventually go on to find its application in the gas chambers of Auschwitz. Paint and poison – the same object could be both, the way we wanted to see it.
This was Sheba Chhachhi’s Ajab Karkhana, displayed as part of the exhibition Geographies of Yourself, which attempted to explore the notion of the ‘site’, contextualizing the relationship between the personal and the historical. On display were Zarina Hashmi’s works – my personal favourites that offer an exploration of the idea of home and homelessness, displacement and memory. Among others, were James Benning’s film Measuring Change exploring the impact of the climate on the idea of a changing home, and Ai Weiwei’s quasi-pixelated retelling of Monet’s Water Lilies using Woma (the Chinese equivalent of Lego) bricks. The ‘site’ of the home continues to evolve through a lifetime, thus making it a complex concept held together by multiple artistic and conscious forces of the self and the surroundings.
Gurdeep Dhaliwal’s installation, Inverted Realities, had cotton plants hanging upside down to depict the arduous lives of cotton farmers. As the viewers bent down and walked warily to save themselves from the thorns, it offered an introspection into the struggle of the farmer, drawing attention to crop destructions, economic hardships, and the alarming rate of farmers’ suicides in Punjab.
The Power Plant, a photo series and video installation by Ravi Agarwal, places the coal-fuelled power plant – the icon of growth and development for post-independence India – as its central theme. Ravi’s camera captures the emptiness of abandoned plants, shut down because they are now environmental hazards. The text, written by Ravi, that accompanies the video, is brilliantly composed – introspecting on the passage of time and the meaning of creation with documentations of empty power plant spaces as the backdrop.
Art inhabited every space that the Serendipity Arts Festival took over across Panjim. I could walk into any room, and there would be something for me to explore across multiple media – film, photography, painting, or even sound. I spent hours going through catalogues of Zarina Hashmi’s work, or in a roomful of Bhupen Khakhar paintings. Art found a home in open spaces too – the unique Art Park, where I went to take a short morning walk, had photo exhibits nestled amid the greens, thematically highlighting the Goan way of life – richly important from the perspective of the personal history archive.
Lastly, and perhaps my favourite – a spectacular tribute to artist Hanif Kureshi, whom we lost earlier this year. Designed and created by Aaquib Wani, four walls of a massive black box were adorned with street sign-painted letters from across the country, and archives from Hanif’s library were used. Hanif had taken art to the streets, and this tribute to our beloved artist stood right in the middle of the main festival area. The place bustled with people at all times – artists, art enthusiasts, curious passers-by, enthusiastic kids. I can’t say with certainty that everyone realised what the huge, colourful box really stood for, but I would keep walking past that area throughout the day, and stop to stare at it for a few seconds, grateful for its existence. It was, to me, the very symbol of the festival itself – an attempt to make art a part of the everyday, and if I stared hard enough, I could see the colours drift off from the wall, and blur into each of our hearts.
