Sing, muse
They say two heads are better than one. Does the same hold true for different forms of classical music? Neeta Helms, founder and owner of Classic Movements, would say so.
When Neeta Helms came back to India seven years ago, she was delighted to find a growing demand for western classical music. "Because of the wealth of Indian classical music and dance, I guess there's never really been a vacuum," she says.
Helms is the founder and owner of Classic Movements, a concert touring company for orchestras and choirs that performs all over the world.
After speaking with choral communities in India, Helms realised the country needed choral directors experienced both in classical music and in training choirs. And so, the India Choral Fellowship (ICF) was born. The fellowship seeks to expose people to choral music and bolster existing programmes with teachers and resources.
The fellowship's first guest conductor is Grammy award-winning choral director Kevin Fox, who has spent the past two weeks training choirs in Delhi. ICF will send three more conductors later this year, with the goal of eventually sending more than 100 conductors and trainers to various cities, including Mumbai, Chennai, Calcutta, Pune and Bengaluru.
Both Fox and Helms stress that they are trying to bolster Indian classical music by sharing western voice techniques. "If it stays authentically Indian, that's marvellous," Helms says. But she would love to see a blend of both classical styles.
"This is an opportunity to open some doors," Fox says. "The world could use as much understanding and making music together as possible."
-Teresa Mathews
THEATRE
Outdoor drama
Fed up with the artificial formality of auditorium theatre, some of Bengal's leading dramatists are taking their productions to the masses. "I'm very tired of the cliched structure of theatre. There is no soul, no body. I am trying to come out and take theatre to where it belonged: our roots of tradition and culture," says Manish Mitra of theatre group Kasba Arghya. Urubhangam, the group's seven-and-a-half hour play based on the Mahabharata, moves through five different locales over the course of the production-with the audience travelling alongside. It begins on the edges of a crematorium, with the background of actual funeral pyres and crowds of bereaved helping create the fraught atmosphere of the Kurukshetra battlefield. As the action moves from the crematorium to the river banks, the forest and other locales, a mixed audience of villagers and the urban elite makes a physical and spiritual journey too.
-Romita Datta