Commissions

The damaru is a traditional percussion instrument that bears multifaceted religious and cultural underpinnings that have come to shape the creative pulse of this project. This performance will explore the profound symbolism of the instrument in Hindu mythology — illuminating spiritual notions around the unity of existence — and the interplay between creation and destruction, welding its chosen movement forms with the Tandava that Shiva performed to the beats of the damaru, precipitating in the creation of the sound of music. 

Dancers Nilava Sen (India) and Shyam Dattani (UK) will bring their artistic prowess, creativity, and interpretations to this show, collaborating with the musical duo Shadow and Light (Pavithra Chari and Anindo Bose) and the accomplished light designer Gyandev Singh. This union of tradition and modernity promises to unlock new dimensions of artistic expression. Choreographic mentors include Morag Deyes and Tanushree Shankar.

Continuing the valued partnership between Sampad and Serendipity Arts, this commissioned piece will premiere at Serendipity Arts Festival 2023. Following its debut, the production is looking to tour several Indian cities. ‘Damaru’ has been invited to join the Birmingham International Dance Festival with a UK tour in 2024.

Commissioned by Serendipity Arts

Artwork by Veena Basavarajaiah

Cartoon Natyam is a digital initiative by Veena Basavarajaiah designed to create a space to have conversations around various questions relevant to the art world. It started with an online forum where cartoons and illustrations were used to elicit discussions on issues that are socially and politically impacting artists and their practice. This interactive installation at Serendipity Arts Festival will look at how this idea of dialogue between art, practice, and audience can be extended into a public space, to engage a wider community of art-lovers.

Veena Basavarajaiah is a movement practitioner who has been learning and performing various artforms for more than two decades and has constantly been curious about creating innovative ways and mediums of engaging with the audience. She views these cartoons not just as social commentary but also as choreographic pieces. The simplicity of the images ensures that they are highly relatable to both practitioners and the audience. Each of these images are carefully constructed using the elements of time, space, texture and context in mind. Unlike dance/ movement that is often ephemeral, these compositions take a much more tangible shape that stay in the audience’s mind, provoking them to think and question in deeper ways. ‘Practice as research’ is Veena’s approach to creating these illustrations and the images are informed by years of training, performing and engaging with the art world in a critical way. The project’s Instagram profile is cartoon_natyam. 

This performance seeks to provide an insight into the life and teachings of the 13th century saint Janabai and the 14th century saint Lalleswari or Lalded as she was fondly called. Both were female mystic poets driven by their love for the supreme who went through tremendous hardships before they were finally recognised. 

Janabai was born in a Shudra family in Maharashtra and belonged to the Warkari tradition. Her Marathi abhangs reflect her clarity of thought and her state of spiritual consciousness. Lalded’s Vakhs (or sayings) in Kashmiri touched the common man for their simultaneous simplicity and profundity. 

Janabai was a Vaishnavite while Lalded was a Shaivite. Janabai believed in forms of the Divine while Lalded believed in the formless. Janabai took the path of devotion while Lalded took the path of tantra. They appear to be different, but there is no denying that they were both Mad and Divine.

‘Mad and Divine’ was originally commissioned by Dr Anita Ratnam in 2011 for Kartik Fine Arts Chennai for the conference by the same name. 

Rama Vaidyanathan is one of the foremost Bharatanatyam dancers of her generation. She trained under the legendary dancer Yamini Krishnamurthy and the celebrated Guru Saroja Vaidyanathan. In a performance career spanning more than 35 years, Rama has developed her own individual style while preserving the core principles of her dance form. Her technique is grounded and yet there is a fresh approach to the innumerable dance compositions that she has presented at major dance venues all over the world. Rama Vaidyanathan is the recipient of several awards and honours. As the Vice President of Ganesa Natyalaya, New Delhi, she has been actively engaged in teaching for over 25 years. 

At Serendipity Arts, we strive to document and bolster interdisciplinary and cross-cultural exchanges in the arts through a range of writing initiatives. Towards that goal, we launched Projects/Processes in 2017 to publish commissioned research essays, longform writing, and in-depth criticism that explore the ideas and processes behind select curatorial projects at Serendipity Arts Festival. In 2022, we also published an anthology collating essays published over the years as part of Write | Art | Connect, our online platform for short form writing around arts and culture. 

 Through these initiatives, we hope to take part in a long and rich tradition of writing around cultural themes in the subcontinent, contextualised against larger socio-historical discourses and rubrics. ‘Text/Matters’ is a project that seeks to highlight our engagement with that tradition, and we are pleased, therefore, to showcase the archives of two pivotal publications—Marg, a pioneering magazine now in its 75th year, and Art India, a premier quarterly that has been probing developments in modern and contemporary art for the past 27 years in fresh idioms and contexts. Welding incisive writing and scholarship with inventive designs and eclectic cover art, these two publications have been chosen in order to represent two stages in the history of writing and publishing around arts and culture.

 Additionally, as part of ‘Text/Matters’, we will be hosting a space for Offset Projects, Reliable Copy, Chennai Photo Biennale among other small presses and independent publishers, in order for them to showcase their publications to a wider and more engaged public at Serendipity Arts Festival. The prolific app-based editorial initiative ASAP|Art will also be included within this space. To lend more context to the themes and impulses of this project, we will finally be programming a series of talks by scholars, writers, publishers, and artists demystifying the variegated legacies of print culture and design in the decades since Independence.

Commissioned by the Rural Touring Dance Initiative in association with Perth TheatrecDeveloped with the support of Creative Scotland, Dancebase, The Place, Scottish School of Contemporary Dance, Dundee & Angus College, The Work Room, Made in Scotland Touring Fund. 

The India 2023 tour is supported by British Council.

There is a world of neither here nor there which is a transit waiting room. Corridors in hospitals where families await news of loved ones; lock-ups in police stations where the arrested await trials that will decide their fate; daily queues of unskilled workers where they await a job for a day; taxi drivers in a multi-level car park awaiting customers; souls in purgatory awaiting judgment and away out or onward… At that point and space, we lose our individual identities – we are all waiters, stuck in time at the mercy of someone somewhere else making the decisions – or not. As we wait endlessly, patience frays to frustration, hope droops to despair, expectation sinks to boredom, control explodes to violence. And still, we wait…The multilevel parking space is one such limbo land where very little happens – apart from waiting. But it is at the epicenter, beginning, and end of many other journeys. 

 In this devised performance piece, these ghosts that inhabit the parking lot meet the ghosts of characters from several texts, as well as ghosts from the performers’ own lives. These various stories filter into each other. What could these characters say to each other? Can they release us all from a place where time seems to have stopped, as the world implodes, explodes and re-emerges around us with the slow tenacity of the elemental?

 ‘Epicentre’ brings together text, movement, design, and – of course – the site, in multi-sensory manner, exploring moments of varied experience that interconnect into a whole, rather than a single narrative thread.