Powerful Dance and Folk Music at Serendipity Arts Festival Goa 2017

PANJIM:
The first day of the sensational Serendipity Arts Festival – Goa 2017 holds its promise to mystify and celebrate performing art, as celebrities, renowned and new, take center stage to showcase entrancing performances.
The city of Panjim already embellished to elate people who saw the artworks displayed at every entry point of a total of ten special venues turned into a palate of multi-colored frames, columns, and banners making the city-space hypnotic. Tomorrow Film Maker, Mira Nair, is performing ‘Monsoon Wedding’ for the first time ever at Art Spectrum Awards South Asia (ASASA) at DB Grounds from 7:00 pm onwards.
Serendipity Arts Festival Goa 2017 powered by Tata Consultancy Services, is a one of a kind show which brings a diverse set of India’s celebrated artists and a wide spectrum of international artists, who have dedicated their cause to reviving India’s performing arts; fundamentally the cultural and culinary arts sector; which we’ve possibly been missing out on regardless of the modernization witnessed by this vast sub-continent’s massive cultural multifariousness, according to Sunil Munjal, Founder & Chief Patron, Serendipity Arts Trust.
Today marks the first leg of this exquisitely elegant journey of the Serendipity Arts Festival Goa 2017, starting with a bang as the distinguished and most celebrated artist, and primarily needs little introduction, as her name speaks of accomplishments and accolades, the eminent Shubha Mudgal, a winner of the Padma Shri Award, took audiences on a sunset cruise – the ‘River Raga’ – a cruising musical interlude on the Mandovi River and regaled people with Indian classical music curated to beguile music dilettantes.
In another assigned venue, Sanjeev Bhargava, founder of Seher and a connoisseur from the world of advertising in collaboration with Daksha Sheth, the illustrious dancer and owner of the Daksha Sheth Dance Company, enamoured audiences with a tantalizing dance performance – the ‘Sari – The Unstitched’; based on the emotional connect of the weaver’s imagination to India’s national dress the Sari.
This quintessential portrayal of an act played out in a dramatic dance theme celebrating the jewel of the Indian handloom industry the ‘Sari’. The show displays the art of draping a sari in stillness and in movement, highlighting a woman’s demeanour and her regional identity; as India has a large variety of prints and patterns, a remarkable deluge when it comes to choosing sarees from different states. Every state essentially has its own designs, weaves and patterns.
The much-awaited show ‘The Ground beneath My Feet’ on a docked barge, that is varied in forms of utopias of a rare compilation of contemporary art infused with cutting edge performances by artists from around the world. The show curated by the AAA (Asian Art Archive) and HH Art Spaces, was set on a barge adorned to look and feel like the beginning of a journey into the fragmented dimensions of rising rivers and seas.
The essence of the barge that has been docked for next 8 days of the festival on a jetty along the Mandovi riverbank evokes a brilliant inquest about the ground beneath out feet. While performances and the exhibition itself showcased rapidly transforming relationships of the bodies with their natural and technological environments of today’s modern world with glimpses of the old world. This is a journey that awakens the minds and invokes the long history of travel and migration, and most of all how the site of geopolitics, today, is the sea.
Serendipity Arts Festival – Goa 2017 also has been responsible for putting India on the world map for performing culinary cultural arts. This initiative is a personal passion of the patronage of Munjal, who has been involved personally in curating the SAF-Goa 2017.This year is all about scale and pushing boundaries – SAF 17, will be experimenting with site, form and display. Along with a line-up of scintillating programming spanning music, dance, theatre, visual arts, and culinary arts, this year’s edition is an unmissable spectacle of epic proportions.
Serendipity Arts Festival 2017 will feature projects curated by some of the leading names in their respective fields: Dinesh Khanna and Prashant Panjiar (Photography), Ranjit Hoskote and Riyas Komu (Visual Arts), Manu Chandra and Odette Mascarenhas (Culinary Arts), Sanjeev Bhargava and Tanushree Shankar (Dance), Lillete Dubey and Anuradha Kapur (Theatre) and Shubha Mudgal and Ranjit Barot (Music).