A month-long exchange over multiple art forms aims to put creative expression and dialogue back in the city’s gut, says Bryan Richard
About one year ago a few of the city’s young theatre artists decided to question their received notions of performance and art with an experiment in spaces and cooperation. It was an experiment coerced by the practical concerns so endemic to a Bangalore thesp – too few supportive performance spaces, mostly empty pockets, and marginal training to help them polish their craft. They decided they would try to meet in spaces that were unconventional for performance. They would invite both fellow theatre practitioners as well as other artists to come together and share short creative works without restrictions and across forms. They would attempt to nurture the conversations that sprang up, while documenting the process. And they would try to have fun doing it. In short, they thought they’d jam. And persistently jam they have every first Sunday of each month, through rain and shine, dramatic fluctuations in attendance, dud days, and moments of individual and shared ‘a-has’.
But it’s not the merely utilitarian impulses that drive these performers to meet. Alloyed with it is a rather restless curiosity over fundamental questions. And they pursue them with the strange winsomeness of cultural guerrillas who believe in dialogue the way the junta believes in its guns.
“We are always trying to ask ourselves what words like ‘development’, ‘education’, ‘community’ and even ‘art’ actually mean,” Ekta Mittal of Maraa, the media collective that initiated the jams, had told Time Out Bangalore in November last year when we first featured them. In focussing their efforts towards building inclusive, participatory encounters within public spaces over one year, Mittal and her friends at the jams have continued to extend those inquiries. They’ve had to grapple with how art fits into the life of communities, how it can intersect with activism, and how their own artistic interventions can address the complex politics that define the city’s public places across class and gender lines. But even they admit that asking questions is not the same as having the answers (if indeed there are answers to be had). “It’s taken a whole year just to get a representation of what we are trying to do and how things are,” said Deepak Srinivasan, who also works with Maraa and has been instrumental in facilitating the jams. “But it’s a slow, organic process and there’s no way to get around that. But I think we are gradually managing to build a core group that is committed to the idea.”
Still, the jams have long since extended beyond their theatre roots and have frequently featured solo performances, music collaborations, storytelling, short workshops by artists, visual art displays, installations and the like in public parks, semi private spaces and city streets. And now, with the completion of a whole year of the exercise, they’ve decided that the most apropos way to celebrate is to just jam some more. Right through the month of October, in fact.
“We are trying to pack the whole of October with performances and activities by all kinds of artists and across art forms,” said Mittal. This time around, the jammers will be hitting a wider range of spaces, from parks, to terraces, local bars, streets and markets. Events will span theatre performances and workshops with the radical, feminist, issue-driven theatre of Delhi-based group Pandies, to Kannada/ Tamil song nights at Lavanya Bar in Adugodi or photography exhibitions in the heart of Shivajinagar’s market. It’s a month long experiment that could go a lot of places… or nowhere. And the jammers are clear that the difference between going one way or the other will hinge on them being able to draw in new faces.
“This month-long jam thing is a concerted attempt to reach out to diverse audiences across class descriptors and to engage regular people off the street. Of course, as artists, we are also trying to experiment with different and newer spaces, and see if we can handle such a lively schedule,” said Mittal. “We’d really like people to call us, suggest an idea or tell us what they want to do… and then drive it. It’s as open source as it can get.”
“The past year has tested our ideas of what art should be. And we’d like people who engage the jams to see that there don’t necessarily have to be a bunch of codes to crack art – like it’s some insider joke,” clarified Srinivasan. “Perhaps a key will be to keep it community based, rather than artist-driven.”
Source : Time Out Bengaluru ISSUE 1 Friday, July 23, 2010
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