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Performances that you simply must catch at the ‘Remembering Veenapani Festival’
Summary
The annual festival celebrates experimentation with form and themes through productions such as ‘Do You Know this Song?’Every year in April—on the birth anniversary of Veenapani Chawla, founder of Adishakti—the leafy campus located on the periphery of Auroville holds an annual celebration. The rhythms of musical instruments and roaring applause signal the arrival of ‘Remembering Veenapani Festival’ (RVF), a tribute to the stalwart’s life.
It began with a gathering of performers and friends after the demise of Chawla and soon developed into a full-fledged interdisciplinary festival. In its 11th edition, this week-long festival brings together music, theatre and a series of engaging workshops.
A lot has changed since RVF was conceptualised but some of the festival’s tenets remain the same. All performances are free, and attendees must collect tokens at 6.30 pm on the day of the show. The small in-house theatre, the Sir Ratan Tata Koothu Kovil, is usually bursting at the seams with no less than 250 attendees for each show. For music shows in the outdoor amphitheatre, surrounded by trees, as many as 400 attendees may show up.
The audience is as diverse as it can get, from the global residents of Auroville, and residents from neighbouring villages to tourists from around the country and some who choose to travel for the festival. “Veenapani believed that the more diverse the performances, the better it is for theatre," says Nimmy Raphel, managing trustee, Adishakti. “So, the festival had to be multidisciplinary."
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There is no theme, and the line-up curated by Raphel and artistic director Vinay Kumar is a collection of work the duo admires. “But, they have to be shows that have not been performed in Auroville or Puducherry before," says Raphel. Do You Know This Song? by Mallika Taneja is one of the two visiting plays at RVF. The solo piece, which has won in several categories at the Mahindra Excellence in Theatre Awards, talks about erasure of a female musician in a domestic setting. A deeply-felt narrative, based on extensive interviews, forms the backbone of the piece as the protagonist moves from her current self to the musician she once was. She uses dolls, musical instruments like the harmonium to make the story come alive. The other visiting piece is Yele Oota by Vishwakiran Nambi Dance Company, which uses dance to speak of abundance and scarcity.
For the first time, Adishakti will host an evening of qawwali by the Warsi Brothers on the last day of the festival. The festival, in past editions, has had a performance of the latest Adishakti plays as well. This time, they have chosen three—Urmila, Bhoomi, and Bali. “We travel around the country and the world with our work, but don’t always get to perform in our centre, where the work has been created," says Raphel. They will be performing on home ground after a hiatus of two years.
Bhoomi (day five of the festival), adapted from the original Bhoomirakshasam by novelist Sara Joseph, uses the play-within-a-play format for an artist’s inquiry into the patriarchal nature of her own practice. The narrative shifts between a performance set in the Dandakaranya Forest and the actor’s real world.
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Besides this, the RVF has begun posting content daily online. These are recordings by artists and performers, who have had associations with Adishakti in the past. The first one features actor Aamir Khan, who talks about the magic of Adishakti’s theatre and Veenapani’s resolute focus on the form. This is followed by a video by actor Naga Chaitanya. Other recordings featuring Tovino Thomas, Prabhu Deva, and Vijay Sethupathi are yet to be released. There will also be clips from theatre stalwarts like Sunil Shanbag and Neelam Man Singh. The festival will also host the launch of 18 of Chawla’s academic papers in the form of an e-book. “These detail Veenapani's ideas on form and hybridity that drew from the Eurocentric but were firmly rooted in Indian aesthetic," says Kumar.
‘Remembering Veenapani Festival’ is on till 19 April at Adishakti, Auroville.
