When artistes perform for the planet
The Hindu
First Edition Arts’ Blue Planet is a series of live concerts filmed in natural settings
You hear the sound of the tambura along with birds chirping and gurgling water, as musicians perform in carefully curated natural, outdoor settings. Filmed across India, First Edition Arts’ (FEA) Blue Planet series hopes to highlight the connect between environment and art.
Started in 2014, FEA was one of the earliest with online musical offerings. Now, it will use the digital medium again to offer viewers a multi-layered experience. While each episode is primarily a concert, woven in are vignettes of people and their issues from the places where the programmes are filmed .
By setting musicians in locales such as forests, groves and water bodies, FEA hopes it will pull the classical arts ecosystem out of its insular bubble. According to Devina Dutt of FEA, the inspiration was the citizen-spurred environmental campaign, ‘Amche Mollem’, in Goa, which recently won the Sanctuary Wildlife Campaign award. “It was this campaign’s use of the visual arts to protest the clearing of forests for infrastructure projects that crystallised the idea of Blue Planet.”