Diverse fare to mark Veenapani festival getting under way this week

An impressive line-up of top exponents from the realms of theatre, music and dance will be performing during the ninth edition of the ‘Remembering Veenapani Festival’ hosted by the Adishakti Laboratory for Theatre Art Research (ALTAR) from Wednesday.

An impressive line-up of top exponents from the realms of theatre, music and dance will be performing during the ninth edition of the ‘Remembering Veenapani Festival’ hosted by the Adishakti Laboratory for Theatre Art Research (ALTAR) from Wednesday.

A concert by Hindustani vocalist Shubha Mudgal will raise the curtain of the nine-day, free-entry festival.

The fare on subsequent days of the festival (April 5 to 13) will include music by Siddhartha Belmannu, dance-theatre by Anita Ratnam (Bharatanatyam), Bijayini Satpathy (Odissi) and Kali Billi (Lavani) and theatre by Savita Rani and Aaditya Raawat (the artiste who won the inaugural Adishakti Theatriculate Fellowship to support new work and willl premiere the production at the festival.

Adishakti’s artistic director Vinay Kumar and Nimmy Raphel, managing trustee, told in a press conference that the ninth edition of the festival, organised in memory of the founder Veenapani Chawla who established the centre in 1981, would also feature lec-dems and a new conversation series alongside performances.

The schedule has been curated to cater to audiences across diverse groups and showcases traditional and contemporary genres from Rajasthan, Maharashtra, Tamil Nadu, Odisha and beyond. A new feature is the Adishakti Gupshup, an interactive encounter between artists and audiences in a conversation-style format, which offers a glimpse into creative processes, the hosts said.

Over the years, the ‘Remembering Veenapani Festival’ has risen in stature on the performing arts calendar in India and drawn culture enthusiasts from other cities, including Chennai and Bengaluru. The festival grew organically out of the gathering of well-wishers who came to pay their respects following Chawla’s demise in November 2014.

The festival today carries forward Adishakti’s founding principle of enriching communities and strengthening bonds through the arts. “Adishakti has always stood for hybrid and interdisciplinary modalities and the encouragement of pluralistic worldviews, and the bringing together of numerous performance disciplines from artists,” said Vinay Kumar.