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THE ARTS:
FESTIVAL OF GERMANY
Enriching
Ensemble
The fancy fare apart, the German festival in India will revive a forgotten
interface
by
S. Kalidas
It
might have taken over a decade to materialise, but now that it's happening,
the Festival of Germany in India promises to be a sumptuous and varied
fare. Between September 30 this year and March 2001 India is going to
witness a splurge of German culture. From theatre to music and visual
arts to fashion, the range is awesome.
"India
has such a rich and complex culture," says Georg Lechner, an old
India hand and the commissioner for the festival, "that ever since
I went back five years ago, I have wanted to bring a representative slice
of our own culture to India." In the early 1990s the Indian government
had organised a Festival of India in Germany. The return festival has
been pending since then. But after the wall came down uniting the two
Germanys, resources were stretched and it continued to be put off till
now.
But over
the next six months a fascinating panorama of German art and culture is
scheduled to unravel in many Indian cities. The festival opens with a
performance by the Bavarian State Ballet at the Siri Fort Auditorium in
Delhi on September 30 which will be inaugurated by German Foreign Minister
Joschka Fischer. Then in close succession there will be a host of art
exhibitions, collaborative workshops, seminars, performances of western
classical music and the release of a new Hindi-German dictionary.
Theatre
will be presented in all its manifestations from the traditional to the
avant garde. Billed to visit many Indian cities are the Brechtian Berliner
Ensemble The Rise of Arturo Ui, the Bremer Shakespeare Company doing a
multinational version of The Tempest and Kampnagel and Theater Triebwerk
presenting an adaptation of Henry V.
Among the
several visual arts events planned is "Ornament and Figure",
an exhibition of decorative arts from the middle ages displaying bronze
sculptures, liturgical implements, artefacts in gold, glass cabinets and
altar paintings loaned from the German National Museum at Nuremberg. Contemporary
crafts, ceramics and textiles are also going to be on show (curated by
Barbara Mundt of Berlin) as is a programme of exchange between the Centre
for Design at Essen and the National Institute for Design, Ahmedabad.
For lovers
of the celluloid, there is a special programme within the International
Film Festival of India, where the spotlight is on the decade 1990-2000.
This package of 10 German films will include Helmut Dietl's Schtonk, Tom
Tykwer's Run Lola Run and Wim Wenders' evocative documentary Buena Vista
Social Club on the musician Ry Cooder and his group.
It's
Not Really New: The Indo-German interface is not altogether new. From
the Sanskritist-philosopher Max Mueller to novelist Herman Hesse to the
high priestess of contemporary dance theatre Pina Bausch, this dialogue
covers a wide vocabulary of disciplines. Lechner, who was married to Odissi
prima donna Sonal Mansingh, has been a one-man-catalyst in the Indo-German
encounter. In his 19 years at the Max Mueller Bhavan in Delhi and Mumbai,
Lechner was the architect of what he had then called "East-West encounters"
in the fields of contemporary art and modern dance. Modern Indian dancers
and choreographers like Chandralekha and Astad Deboo presented their early
works in the space that the Bhavan created for them. It is not a surprise
therefore that Lechner wants to have as many joint Indo-German programmes
as possible.
The Hindi-German
Dictionary is one such project on which a team of German Indologists and
the Central Hindi Directorate have been working for some years now. The
1,400 pages of their efforts are to be released in early 2001. Then there
is Die Horen, a double volume that attempts to image India through her
own languages and the writings on India by German authors. There are exchange
programmes for students of cinema and television under which the Potsdam
and Munich film and TV academies will host Indian students for four months
and the Calcutta and Pune institutes will do the same for German students.
The films produced by them will be shown in both countries. A new media
centre and digital studio are to be opened at the Film and Television
Institute of India (Pune) with German help and two scholarships will be
made available for Indian students to study at the Cologne Academy of
Media Arts.
The symposium
on contemporary dance must arouse nostalgia in all who have witnessed
the growth and trends in this field over the decades. There is also a
workshop on light and movement with both Indian and German dancers and
lighting experts participating in it.
"Every
time sensitive artists from two cultures interact some windows open up,"
says Lechner adding, "I hope some of these encounters result in some
lamps being lit and shed illumination for those who come in their wake."
If his track
record of East-West encounters is anything to go by, we can look forward
to a new generation of Chandralekhas and Astad Deboos. And, hopefully,
there will also be a gamut of German artists, dancers and filmmakers who
will draw from their Indian experience to incorporate some new elements
in their works.
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