Home For Dance
Do you love Calcutta, its art, its architecture, its culture, its possibilities?
Would you like more city arts spaces where you can walk in and discover something new & fascinating?
Do you wish to see more creative re-use of the city’s wonderful old structures & buildings? …an exciting hub for the dance-curious that houses all kinds of dance & movement work, let’s say?
This is a step towards a permanent venue for dance and movement practice that we wish to create in a repurposed space in and for the city. Please join us to imagine, discuss, share and build a Home for Dance together.
Over the last three months, the pairs along with 3 assigned mentors and 2 Resource Guides, worked on their ideas keeping in mind sustainability, surrounding neighbourhood impact, community & nurturing audiences for performances in artistic spaces.
The culmination of this residency will see these ideas come to life in physical installations, sound and video projections, performance interventions, film screenings as well as guided walk-throughs of the exhibits by the three pairs and addas held with members of the public.
So come, join us from 3 to 18 December
Schedule of Events ▼
Schedule of Events ➔
Home for Dance - The Exhibition ➔
3 to 18 December, 2021
Special events ➔
• 7 – 8pm
• A one hour curated programme of guided walkthroughs of exhibits by 3 pairs of residency artists, interspersed with live performance interventions. We invite you to kick off the Pickle Factory Community ideas installation
• ‘Bodies in Structures – Movement, Queerness and Belonging’ – an informal adda led by Abanti Bannerjee (Researcher & Performer) & Upasana Das (Researcher, Visual Artist & Playwright) that discusses bodies, its corporeal narrative, memory, ownership, viewership and its preservation.
• ‘How communities can be invited to participate in spaces! Memory and Imagination” – an informal adda led by Paramita Saha (Performer, Curator & Arts Manager) on spaces imagined as cultural spaces or a space for the arts/dance needs the community to come in and become a part of it! What are the ways this could be made to happen?
• Screening of ‘Home’ – a film by Sujoy Prosad Chatterjee – exploring the many facets of home & belonging, portrayed through women sharing their ecstasies, uncertainties, solitude, libido and of course a friendship with oneself. The film screening is followed by an interactive discussion with dancer & Director, Pickle Factory – Vikram Iyengar
• ‘The symbiotic relationship between performer & space’ – an informal adda led by Sayantan Maitra (Curator, Artist & Collaborative Artist) & Monami Nandy (Indian Classical Dancer) on how performance spaces can be a safe space for everyone – the performer & the audience.
• 6 – 7:30pm
• Closing of the exhibition, with an adda ‘Kolkata, Architecture, Arts & Future possibilities’ led by project mentor Iftekhar Ahsan (Entrepreneur & Founder Calcutta Walks) and project resource guide Anubha Fatehpuria (actor & architect). Iftekhar and Anubha will focus on the rich architectural and artistic heritage of the city, and the potential to bring them together to create hubs of art and culture
About The 6 Residency Artists ▼
Abanti banerjee
Abanti Banerjee (she/her) is a researcher, performer and currently Programme Officer of TCAA, Kolkata. Her interest ranges from understanding the society through practice based research, archiving and analyzing the position of a cultural manager who works as a conduit, joining the artists and audiences.She has previously worked as the assistant archivist in Akademi, London in collaboration with V&A under Dr. Ellie Pridgeon. She has received the Erasmus+ Choreomundus Scholarship and curated performances-based exhibitions in Reok Museum, Szeged, Hungary. She has also performed in Footprint Festival (2019), London UK, Amrita-Shergill Cultural Centre, (2018) Budapest, Hungary, Konark Beach Festival, (2012), India, curated a Fundraising event for Kerala floods ‘Kerala Sahayam’, France, (2018).
Upasana Das
Upasana Das (she/they) is a researcher, visual artist, emerging playwright working in the intersections of literature and visual art. As an artist, they are interested in exploring absurdist theatre, violence, childhood, and South Asian queer lives. They have exhibited their work at The Irregular Arts Fair 2020, Paprika Festival (Canada) 2020 and part of the Beyond Borders program by Young People’s Theatre (Canada). They have also been part of creative-research programs by the Foundation of Indian Contemporary Art (FICA), Asia Art Archive (AAA), Mumbai Academy of Moving Images (MAMI), and Film Heritage Foundation.
Paramita Saha
Paramita is a performer, contemporary dancer, curator, and arts manager working out of Kolkata. Paramita was Repertory member, Co-Director of Sapphire Creations Dance Company, Kolkata for 24 years. As Co-Director of Artsforward for the last 10 years. Paramita works with artists and the creative community to build moving messages for social change. She is deeply engaged in the field of environment, audience development for the arts, nurturing and supporting creativity, capacity building and artistic ability in the youth, curating, and designing creative art projects. She runs At the Still Point, India’s only crowd-funded dance platform. She is an ArtThinkSouthAsia 2016 Fellow and a Global Fellow of International Society of Performing Arts 2018 and 2021. During Covid Times her Instagram initiative ArtAloneTogether developed into India’s first and only am-pm, mixed arts online festival featuring artists across disciplines and borders. In July 2021 she founded a Continued Learning Program in Dance called Continew operating in both online and offline formats. In Aug 2021 she co-founded www.unmute.help, an online resource centre to safeguard the rights of performing artists!
Swarup Dutta
Swarup is an award-winning multidisciplinary art and design practitioner, educator, photographer, scenographer. He holds a masters degree in the field of Fashion & Textiles from Nottingham Trent University. His work encompasses working with grassroot artists, reviving languishing craft cultures, he is known for his work in repurposing restoring
heritage houses for adaptive reuse. Swarup’s interdisciplinary approach to design has led
him to create unique sensory experiences. He has been created events nationally; moulding perceptions of public spaces within various cities by hosting site specific art & design related installations in such spaces.
Sayantan Maitra
www.sayantanmaitraboka.com
www.shelterpromotioncouncil.com
Monami Nandy
Monami Nandy is trained in Indian classical dance Odishi. She is a senior disciple of guru Smt. Sharmila Biswas, also a senior repertory dancer at the Odissi Vision and Movement centre (OVM), Kolkata. Monami is also trained in folk dances of Odisha, martial art forms like Chou and Kalarippayattu. She is also trained in Navarasa Sadhana under the guidance of guru G. Venu. She takes regular dance classes for the domestic violence survivor women at SWAYAM, an NGO working for the rights of women and girls and Movement Therapy for the mental and physical wellbeing of women from different ages.
The 3 exhibits ▼
The Tunnel of body-hood in the making
Echoes of voices unheard will assist you through your reflections and ultimate projections. Kolkata is a culturally vibrant & dynamic city, yet does not have a permanent space for performance dedicated towards & used by dancers of the LGBTQIA+ community, which could facilitate queer expression & access to audience viewership. The city’s architecture puts forward a hetero-patriarchal narrative with queer stories on the sideline. One institutional structure which does so is the museum with its findings & scientific categorisation of humans, with only one point of view to describe a dynamic narrative.
We intend to repurpose a museum space in Kolkata -the Nehru Children’s Museum- reclaiming the space & architecture to reflect queer stories of the city. We aim to create a space where all of us within the community could belong & create.
Reimagining the Thonthonia Thakurbati
A 300-year old prayer house in Thonthonia has a chequered history, hosting on its premises both a ‘mandir(temple)’ and a ‘naachghar(performance space for nautch)’. How can this history of contrasting gazes for the dancing body be renegotiated as we imagine this space as a safe and inclusive Home for Dance.
Of dust and clay…
The dynamic cityscape – built first within the imagination and given shape through images, blueprints & concrete- is constituted by innumerable layers of images & imaginations.
Could desires & resentments seep into fissures & cracks to gradually form a different substrata?
With excavation and archival retrieving as the most commonly spoken-about tropes today, could there be other ways to illuminate that which is beneath?
Our Mentors ▼
Iftekhar Ahsan
http://calcuttawalks.com/
https://calcuttabungalow.com/
Christophe Knoch
After studying law, Christophe Knoch worked for different institutions in the fields of opera and theatre. He worked for theatre director and performance artist Christoph Schlingensief as his assistant up until his death in August 2010 when he was entrusted with running operations, notable for the construction of the Opera Village in Burkina Faso. In Spring 2011 Christophe Knoch started the Mica Moca project in Berlin, which evolved to make a strong transdisciplinary impact on the Berlin venue scene.
He currently drives the public discussion on how to repurpose public spaces in Berlin. In his last project he combined his commitment to artistic and urban development in suggesting the creation of a forest in Berlin’s closed airport Tempelhof.
His experience in developing spaces for the arts stems from Mica Moca but also from many other initiatives such as Toplocentrala in Sofia (Bulgaria), Karl Marx Strasse 145 (Berlin) and the ongoing public discussion about the transformation of Berlin Alte Münze Old Mint. Much more than just technical questions it is the aspect of public discourse and participation that makes such spaces landmarks in a city and builders of urbanity.
Mandeep Raikhy
Mandeep Raikhy is a dance practitioner with a particular interest in exploring the intersections between dance creation, performance, research and pedagogy. He studied BA (Hons) in Dance Theatre at Trinity Laban and subsequently worked with Shobana Jeyasingh Dance Company, London, between 2005-09. Since 2010, Mandeep has created several dance works, notably Inhabited Geometry (2010), a male ant has straight antennae (2013), Queen-size (2016) and Anatomy of Belief (2019). Mandeep has been working at Gati Dance Forum since 2009 and currently teaches as assistant professor at the MA Performance Practice (Dance) at Ambedkar University Delhi.
Mandeep Raikhy is a dance practitioner with a particular interest in exploring the intersections between dance creation, performance, research and pedagogy. He studied BA (Hons) in Dance Theatre at Trinity Laban and subsequently worked with Shobana Jeyasingh Dance Company, London, between 2005-09. Since Mandeep has created several dance works, notably Inhabited Geometry (2010), a male ant has straight antennae (2013), Queen-size (2016) and Anatomy of Belief (2019).
Mandeep has been working at Gati Dance Forum since 2009 and has set up Studio Khirki as a collectively managed dance space. GATI has done extensive research into performance spaces in Delhi. Mandeep has a particular interest in programmes that feed into the dance community ecosystem and growing a community around those spaces.
Our Resource Guides ▼
Saskia Oidtmann
Saskia Oidtmann is a choreographer, dancer, and lecturer. She develops movements, concepts and texts, which draw from a genuine corporeal origin. Her focus lies besides stage and site-specific dance projects on filmic movement realisations. She studied dance and choreography at the Laban Centre London and Film and Theatre studies at the Ruhr-Universität Bochum, FU Berlin and is currently completing her PHD about the choreography of the event from the Universität Potsdam.
She has been collaborating with other artists, such as Raisa Kröger, Florian Bücking, Haluk Atalayman, Maija Nurmio, Mark Carberry, Simon Bauer, Eleftherios Veniadis, Benoit Maubrey, Tina Weiler, i.a. Her own work has been shown in Germany, England, Irland, Finland, South Africa and Nicaragua. Furthermore she is co-founder of the collaborative organized performing arts space garage in Berlin Lichtenberg.
The emphasis of her working practice is movement as an event, the body in its presence: in the spontaneous and immediate execution of movement hides an actual and real expression. In her research she is constantly dealing with the question how dance can open up spaces, in which the human being and the body are valued. She lives with her partner and two daughters in Berlin.
Anubha Fatehpuria
Anubha Fatehpuria is an actor and architect. Recipient of Sangeet Natak Akademi’s Ustad Bismillah Khan Yuva Puruskar 2013-14, The Telegraph SHE Awards 2019 and Shyamal Sen Smriti Puraskar 2007, she has worked with stage and screen directors from India and abroad. Trained under late Shyamanand Jalan, she continues to learn the craft with Vinay Sharma. An actor with Padatik Theatre Calcutta since 2002, she is currently Director-Programmes.
Anubha received the Nagpur University Gold Medal for B. Architecture (2001), and interned with Ar. Balkrishna Doshi. Her work is recognised for green practices, and she has a special interest in designing performance spaces
For more details, contact:
+91 98363 42110 programmes.picklefactory@gmail.com
Pickle Factory Dance Foundation, Calcutta is a not-for-profit
company registered under Section 8 of The Companies Act, 2013.
The company was incorporated on 12 July 2017.
