More than one lakh people watched school students perform a wide variety of art forms at different venues here on Friday.
If the audience numbers for the State School Arts Festival were staggering, the number of performers was also breathtaking.
About 14,000 students are participating in this week-long festival in 232 events. Nearly 1,400 journalists are covering it. About 20,000 people are served a free lunch every day. More than 5,000 teachers are involved in the organisation of the festival conducted by the Kerala government.
Prominent winners
The festival turned 60 this year. Past winners who went on to acquire fame include playback singers Yesudas, Chithra, P. Jayachandran, Sujatha, Minmini and Srinivas, actors Manju Warrier, Vineeth and Vineeth Sreenivasan and composers M. Jayachandran, Sreevalsan J. Menon and dancer Neena Prasad. An Education Minister and a Chief Secretary won elocution contests in their youth.
In the second edition of the festival held at Thiruvananthapuram in 1958, Yesudas had come first and Jayachandran second. The festival was not of such a big scale in those days.
In the inaugural edition, held at Kochi in 1957, there were just 400 students in 18 events. Now you can see just about every art form at the festival: classical dances like Bharatanatyam, Kuchipudi, Kathakali and Mohiniattam, classical, light and instrumental music, drama as well as literary events like versification, short-story writing and elocution, and that too in different languages.
The quality at the State festival is usually high, because the students have come through after competing at the school, sub-district and district levels. And there may not be another festival in which one gets to watch so many different art forms.
Global visitors
Some 20,000 people watch Bharatanatyam performances here for hours. “It is amazing; I don’t think there is a festival like this anywhere else in the world,” said Debora Stenta, a dancer from Italy, who came to Kerala to watch the festival, along with her musician husband Igor Niego and their two daughters. “When we learnt about it last year from a friend, we decided to come.” The Kerala government is spending ₹2.10 crore on the festival.
