Spaces for Practice |  #TakeTheCityKolkata : Pickle Factory Season 3
10th Jan – 10th Feb 2023

A vital need in the dance sector in India is to have safe spaces and intensive time to serve  and nurture artists, their practice and process. This is a very different space from that of  actual performance. It is a space for thinking through questions, developing critical and  choreographic practice on one’s own terms, and imagining, experiencing and trying new  ways of doing, making and thinking movement. It is a laboratory space for proposing and  carrying out experiments, free from the pressures of creating finished pieces to present  to an audience. These opportunities for dancers, we find, are few and far between in India,  and almost completely absent in my part of the country, even though cities like Calcutta  are home to large numbers of dance and movement artists. In fact, over the last couple of  years I have been asked – especially by early to mid career dancers who have reached a  level of proficiency and reputation, but are looking to challenge themselves and their  practice in fresh ways – ‘where do we go next to keep growing?’ This speaks to my own  experience over the last decade. Feeling the need to refresh and challenge myself as a  performance maker and performer, I stepped out of my Calcutta domain in 2014 to work  with Indian and international contemporary choreographers and directors. This opened up, questioned, and refashioned my ways of approaching, conceiving and presenting  performance, as well as sowed very different questions and perspectives that continue to  challenge and inspire me. Such experiences simultaneously validate, re-align, and enrich our individual journeys as artists, and are most valuable at a cusp stage in our careers  when we require fresh and untried avenues to explore and discover. 

The Spaces for Practice programme in January 2023 addresses this need. The programme  will be in partnership with Pickle Factory Dance Foundation, and sit within the larger  framework of Pickle Factory Season 3 – #TakeTheCityKolkata. Over the month, four very  different artists from across India will mentor and facilitate four different workshop /  residency experiences re-looking at choreographic practice, creative methodology,  spatial and temporal relationships, and knowledge and interpretation of the body. These  are aimed at different levels and backgrounds of participants, focussing on early and mid career practitioners from east and north-east India, which has a large and diverse  performance culture but very little in terms of such opportunities. Participants will be  selected through either invitation or open call, considering their ability to both contribute to the experience and be enriched by it. The intention, structure, process and duration of  each experience varies, in keeping with a commitment to foregrounding the plurality of  voices and possibilities that the dance world offers and actively creates. The common  motivation, though, is to provide thought-provoking and practice-based inspiration and  challenges to young dance artists from the region asking critical questions of themselves,  their practice, and their relationships to their art and societies.