Serendipity Arts London
As part of the Great Exhibition Road Festival, Serendipity Arts presents two captivating interventions across South Kensington and Science Museum Lates.
Lates at the Science Museum are adults-only, after-hours events that offer the chance to explore the museum at night. Experience the blend of a film and live performance echoing through the museum after dusk. Meanwhile, the streets of South Kensington comes alive with a vibrant procession of larger-than-life puppets from India. Read on for all the details.
Giants on the Move: A Puppet Street Parade
DATE:
6th and 7th June, 2026
Venue:
Exhibition Road
TIME:
12:45-13:15 and 15:15-15:45
Duration:
30 minutes
Age Restrictions:
None
A man walks beside an elephant, a bird glides above another, a camel drifts next to a woman, a deer dances with a child.
For brief moments, the road of South Kensington is taken over by a vibrant procession, directed by puppeteer Dadi Pudumjee and presented by Serendipity Arts.
Weaving between the museum facades and the pavement cafés, the parade becomes a gathering of many lives. As it moves forward, cloth becomes skin, bamboo becomes bone, and the road itself becomes a place of congregation and celebration rather than just passage.
Sound is made live, as drummers set the pace with a steady pulse, and the clacking of the puppeteers’ steps along with the music come together to form the score.
For a short while, the city holds a different rhythm, where many forms move together in balance, sharing space without hierarchy and imagining a world shaped by coexistence.
Concept and Direction
Dadi Pudumjee, Founder, The Ishara Puppet Theatre Trust
Puppeteers
Vivek Kumar
Shamsul
Shameem Mohammad
Kumari Yadav
Mohit Mukherjee
Thirusiloovai Joshua Chin
Vinay Bhaat
Mukesh Bhaat
Rahul Kumar
Ajit Bhatt
Musicians
Nathoo Lal Solanki
Tej Prakash Solanki
Narsi Lal Solanki
Vijay Rana
नैनन की ठगी (Eyes Shall Deceive)
DATE:
June 5, 2026
Venue:
Science Museum, London
time
18:30
Age Restrictions:
18+
Eyes Shall Deceive is a 30-minute film that reflects on the musical folklore stemming from contemporary urban India. Shot on 16mm film, mostly after dusk in Kolkata, Varanasi, and Mumbai, it weaves live performances—brass band, Vedic chants, percussion ensembles—accompanied by a live group of musicians. The sound extends beyond the screen into the cinema hall, where performers deepen the audience’s sense of proximity to Indian music.
Sound design anchors the film’s overarching theme, Rites of Passage. It signifies rituals or activities that mark an individual’s transition from darkness to vision, solitude to community, departure to arrival. Music also emerges as a ritual along with everyday acts of gathering in often alienating urban settings, as people seek connection through collective listening. In the liminal hours, birth chants mingle with sweeping, washing, preparation and ordinary gestures elevated to rhythmic rites.
Performers drift in dreamlike transience, their fleeting assemblies carving intimacy amid migrant, fractured urban sprawl. Echoing Bhakti poets like Kabir and Gorakhnath, the film claims the unfinished night as a realm of uncertainty, reflection, possibility, where the notions of real and the imagined are in continuous negotiation.
The film brings innovation to the Science Museum not through technology but form. It proposes a cinema that is not simply watched but collectively lived by collapsing distinctions between film and live performances.
CAST AND CREDITS:
Urupaanar – Tharun Sekar, Si Su, Pravekha, Ravichandran, Goutham, Vasu Venkatesan, K.R. Keerthirathan, Vishwa Bharath, R.S Vikram, Elaiya Bass
movement plan
Phase 1 | Zaha Hadid Sculpture Alcove, Mathematics, The Winton Gallery, Floor 02
Phase 2 | Marc Quinn Sculpture, Medicine & Bodies, Floor 01
Phase 3 | Making the Modern World, Ground Floor
Phase 4 | IMAX: The Ronson Theatre at the Science Museum
Presented in Collaboration with
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