Performances that you should simply look at the 'Remembering Veenapani Festival'

Copyright © HT Digital Streams Limit all rights reserved. Lounge Prachi Sibal 3 min Read 16 Apr 2025, 04:15 pm is a scene out ‘Do you know this song?’ 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 holds an annual celebration on Auroville’s periphery. The rhythms of musical instruments and roaring applause give an indication of the coming of ‘Remembering Veenapani Festival’ (RVF), a tribute to the lives of the stalwarts. It started with a gathering of artists and friends after the downfall of Chawla and soon developed into a full -fledged interdisciplinary festival. In the 11th edition, this week -long festival brings together music, theater and a series of engaging workshops. Many have changed since RVF has been conceptualized, but some of the principles of the festival remain the same. All performances are free, and participants must collect signs at 18:30 on the day of the show. The small internal theater, the Sir Ratan Tata Koothu Kovil, usually bursts at the seams with no less than 250 participants for each show. For music programs in the outside amphitheater, surrounded by trees, as many as 400 participants can arrive. The audience is as diverse as it can get from the worldwide residents of Auroville, and residents of neighboring villages to tourists from across the country and some who prefer to travel for the festival. “Veenapani believed that the more the performances, the better it is for theater,” says Nimmy Raphel, the management of the curator, Adishakti. “So the festival had to be multidisciplinary.” Also read: ‘Alappuzha Gymkhana’ review: The most delicious you will have in the cinema this year is no theme, and the series compiled by Raphel and artistic director Vinay Kumar is a collection of work that admires the duo. “But they have to be shows that have not been performed in Auroville or Puducherry before,” says Raphel. Do you know this song? By Malika Taneja is one of the two visiting plays at RVF. The solo piece, which won in various categories during the Mahindra Excellence in Theater Awards, talks about eradicating a female musician in a domestic environment. A deep -fell 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 alive. The other visiting piece is Yele Oota by Vishwakiran Nambi Dance Company, who uses dance to talk about abundance and scarcity. For the first time, Adishakti presents an evening of Qawwali through the Warsi brothers on the last day of the festival. The festival also had a performance of the latest Adishakti plays in previous issues. This time they chose three – Urmila, Bhoomi and Bali. “We travel through the country and the world with our work, but cannot always act in our center where the work was created,” says Raphel. They will act on the home field after a two -year downtime. 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 investigation into the patriarchal nature of her own practice. The narrative shifts between a performance in the Dandakaranya forest and the real world of the actor. Also read: Weekly Planner: Step out for a lot of art and music besides that, the RVF has begun daily to place content online. These are recordings by artists and artists, who have had associations with Adishakti in the past. The first one contains actor Aamir Khan, who talks about the magic of Adishakti’s theater and Veenapani’s definite focus on the form. This is followed by a video by actor Naga Chaitanya. Other recordings with Tavino Thomas, Prabhu Deva and Vijay Sethupathi have yet to be released. There will also be tracks of theater stops like Sunil Shanbag and Neelam Man Singh. The festival also presents the introduction of 18 of Chawla’s academic articles in the form of an e-book. “This detail Veenapani’s ideas about form and hybridity that drew from the Eurocentric, but were firmly rooted in Indian aesthetics,” says Kumar. ‘Remember Veenapani Festival’ is at Adishakti, Auroville on April 19. Catch all the business news, market news, news reports and latest news updates on Live Mint. Download the Mint News app to get daily market updates. More Topics #Features Mint Specials