The Serendipity Arts Festival is India’s
first multi-disciplinary arts
event that unfolds over eight days in December in multiple venues across the
city of Panjim. The Festival has successfully completed two editions in Goa,
attracting artists, tourists and the general public of Goa in huge numbers.
It is organised by the Serendipity Arts
Foundation, a Munjal initiative for creativity that is a not-for-profit arts
and cultural development foundation that fosters cultural development and
supports emerging artists across South Asia.
This year, the Foundation will further its
strong commitment to instigating tangible and lasting change across the country
via a series of public programmes that intend to increase awareness of how art
can impact society, whilst also fostering the development of thriving artistic
communities across India by making the arts inclusive, educational and
accessible.
If you enjoyed reading this article, you can help support our journalism by adding OHeraldo as a preferred source.
As part of the education programmes, the
organisers are collaborating with the Goa Education Department for
5-day-workshop projectsthat are taking place within Government High Schools
Keri, Morlem and Surla from today, November 27 to December 1, 2018.
Titled ‘Stories Of Nature’, the
workshopswill consider the narratives of nature, where everything, from trees,
birds and animals to rivers, mountains and man, tells a story. The workshop
will integrate storytelling, movement and music, drawing on children’s innate
capacity for fantasy and imaginative play, and their ability to differentiate
between the conventions of a story or drama and real life. Using the vocabulary
of traditional dance and martial arts practices to tell stories with the body,
the workshop will reconnect movement with expression, and allow children to
explore their world. The distance afforded by characters and events that are
not real will also help children to engage with significant issues which are
relevant to their daily lives, in a way that is not intimidating, but
enjoyable.
Serendipity Arts Festival’s third edition (scheduled for
December 2018), will emphasise programmes that are designed to engage children
of all ages. In previous years, education and outreach activities conducted
with groups of children in both formal and informal settings were incredibly
well received.
The ‘Songs of Nature’workshops are being conducted with students
between Stds 5th and 8th, across high schools in Goa, for a total of three
sessions each day over five days at each respective school. Jhelum Paranjape,an
Odissi choreographer and teacher based in Mumbai will be the lead facilitator
alongside RaamKumar R, a kalarippayattu practitioner who comes from the CVN
Kalari Trivandrum family, based in Bangalore.
“Our research and learnings show us that activities for children
were extremely well-received at previous editions of Serendipity Arts Festival.
This year, the festival is expanding in both scope and scale; we want to take
the arts beyond performance spaces and deepen an active relationship between
artists and society at large. We are going to reach out to a wider selection of
schools across the state of Goa, and are delighted to collaborate with Goa’s
Education Department, and are particularly interested in taking its programmes
to schools that have fewer opportunities to access the arts,”saidSmriti
Rajgarhia, Director, Serendipity Arts Festival.
Designed to stimulate and feed the curiosity and spirit of
enquiry that young audiences have, projects like these further the Serendipity
Arts Foundation’s mission of taking the arts beyond the cities, and engaging
diverse public audiences – to evolve arts engagement and appreciation.
Students participating will be introduced to non-linear, and
multi-modal art and the project is designed to dovetail with key focus area in
mainstream education such as, how arts can improve communication skills, body
awareness and encourage teamwork, whilst also allowing young minds to be
exposed to new perspectives and stories, via dance and movement.
The project will culminate in a short performance piece that the
students will put together with the guidance of facilitators, which will be
presented on the final day of the workshop to the school, faculty and parents.
While the emphasis of the workshops is on process and not the outcome, the
facilitators will encourage students share the learnings on the final day, to
reflect on the skills imparted during the workshop.
The dance outreach workshops extend the Festival programming
this year. The Dance Discipline curated by Chennai based Bharatanatyam dancer,
choreographer, and Padma Shri recipient Leela Samson and Ranjana Dave, dancer
and arts writer, engages almost all traditional forms of Indian dance,
including folk. The projects will have an interdisciplinary focus and intend to
explore interrelationships between the performing and visual arts, venturing
into alternate spaces, and emphasising gesture and the body. The Theatre
Discipline curated by Arundhati Nag and Atul Kumar will include a series of
special events and theatre performances designed for children, which further
the Foundation’s commitment to arts education.
The
third edition of the Serendipity Arts Festival will take place in Goa from
December 15 to 22, 2018.
