Behind the red doors tucked away in a seemingly tranquil corner of Mahalaxmi, the G5A Foundation for Contemporary Culture is astir. The arts space will be premiering Where I Stand over the weekend, a collaborative performance of four artists – two from India, and two from Scotland – that melds together storytelling, music and poetry.
But the collaboration extends far beyond the stage as the project has been co-curated by G5A and Traditional Arts and Culture Scotland’s (TRACS) Scottish Storytelling Centre (SSC) in Edinburgh, promising a diverse blend of narratives from both the creative process and the end result. Curators Suruchi Pawar and Ishan Benegal from G5A, and SSC’s Miriam Morris got together for a chat with The Hindu about hosting both the first joint residency between the organisations: ‘A New Conversation’.The performance will bring together the landscape of Kashmir, ancient tales of Norse mythology, pre-Independence Mumbai, and 21st century Dundee. What we will see unfold in the city, will then travel to Edinburgh for TRACS’ TradFest in May, is a tapestry of personal, cultural and contemporary narratives. Morris describes how the performance starts with the artists having seemingly independent pieces, sharing shades of similarity across their unique stories and styles. “And yet [in the end], when they come together to share a story – that was almost seamless,” she says, before adding, “You had seen how different they were, but all of a sudden it was like a melting pot of their own personalities, [and they create] this fantastic, really vibrant story,” she says.
Cultural collaborations
While senior curator and creative producer and strategy advisor for G5A, Divya Bhatia, has worked on projects in Scotland for nearly two decades now, it was only recently that his plans to have a co-curated and collaborative residency came to fruition. Discovering a grant under British Council’s 70 Years in India, along with the support of the Scottish Government and Creative Scotland, a public body for Scotland’s arts and creative industries, Bhatia was able to develop ‘A New Conversation’. Benegal explained how the residency format is especially important for its emphasis on the creative process: “It’s all about the process, and dedicating time and resources [towards] the honing of skills, rigour, and all of those things.” He also pointed out that the de-emphasis on a final outcome is often what makes residencies tricky to find financial support. But G5A and SSC found the ideal partners in each other to get the project underway.
Not only do the two organisations share their ethos, but they have a similar history of repurposing structures. While G5A is a reconstructed shed in Mahalaxmi’s mill district and includes spaces of diverse functions within, the SSC is attached to the preserved John Knox house, and the joint Moubray House – the only original medieval buildings on the Royal Mile. Both share a contemporary take on spaces, rooted in history, and the natural starting point for the residency was to have artists who would converse with these cultural narratives.
The context was set deliberately broad, to leave a wide berth for the performers to create. “Initially [it may have been] a challenge of vagueness,” says Pawar, about the non-prescriptive methods the curators used to design the programme.
But they knew what they were looking for in the four artists they would select.
Dramatic synergy
Benegal explained how they sought artists who had a substantial body of work that was both rooted in culture and contemporary, and who worked well in creative collaborations. The curators wanted the artists to explore the synergy they developed beyond their performance, and this resulted in a day-long workshop with a group of women from the fishing village of Worli Koliwada. While Pawar and Benegal finalised on Mumbai-based writer, actor and director Sheena Khalid, and Kashmiri poet-singer-songwriter Mohammad Muneem, Morris and her co-curator Donald Smith chose Edinburgh’s storyteller and musician Daniel Allison, and fiddle-player and composer from Glasgow, Eilidh Firth. “It’s a nice sort of interweaving of past, present, and some inkling of future,” says Benegal about the collaborative performance the artists developed.
The residency’s infusion of diverse voices deepened when seeing the length and breadth of its creative collaboration. On one hand, the residency has brought together four curators and four artists from across the two countries, and on the other, its documentation is being done by Mumbai-based filmmaker Neeraj Jain. His ongoing documentation of the artists’ creative process has produced an Instagram page and a website solely dedicated to the residency. “There is a certain visual language that is entirely his,” shares Pawar. Using a timeline format, Jain has compiled videos, photographs, and the artists’ handwritten notes through the three-week process, and will create a final piece on the synthesis of the larger narrative. For the five days in Scotland, the artists might self-document, adding more authors to the mix, and furthering the many collaborative dimensions of ‘A New Conversation’.
Where I Stand will be staged at Black Box, G5A Foundation for Contemporary Culture, Mahalaxmi, on March 24 and 25.
