Amorphous is a story of a female body by Arts Forward
News Correspondent, abptakmaa, Kolkata, 25th Sept 2020 : At the Still Point is a crowd-funded dance platform curated and produced by Artsforward in Kolkata. It features artists whose work is edgy, dynamic and extraordinary in the way it contributes to current social and political discourse. More than a celebration of dance it is an intervention into the current artist-audience relationship and seeks to make the community a stakeholder in the nurturing and creation of dancers and their practice. This year we present Act IV Ctrl.Alt.Femme: Telling their own stories is a way for women to reclaim the space they have been denied culturally, socially and historically by systemic patriarchy. The presentations of Ctrl. Alt. Femme are:
Amorphous 60 mins. 11 am. On Zoom. Live from Bangalore and Mumbai
Amorphous is a story of a female body. A body that holds the history of generations of women in her family – grandmothers, mothers, daughters – a generation of feminine power or vulnerability? Two artists, a dancer and a documentarian, explore what happens when a body reaches an ‘amorphic’ state. Born out of self research, Amorphous is a visual journal of moving portraits. The deep-rooted, guttural and instinct-based complex dialogue between the contemporary movement artist and the visual artist/documentarian has resulted in stimulating a creative collaborative process that involves intrinsic ( Improvised & Structured dance) and extrinsic (Film & Visual Documentation) elements being the origination of the story-building/narrative of this piece of artwork.
AMORPHOUS.
A Dance x Film Project.
Devised by Ronita Mookerji & Priyanshi Vasani.
Music composition: Nikhil Nagaraj & Gayne (Kalimpong)
Atho Hidimba Katha 100 mins. 7 pm. On Facebook Closed Group. Physically shot and livestreamed in Kolkata
A piece that questions the accepted binaries of good-bad, right-wrong, a play that challenges the status quo through an exciting amalgamation of movement, text, music and performance. Samuho as a performance collective consisting mostly of performers who are women earn a living out of making and showing theatre, making and selling handmade products as ancillary activities. Atho HIdimba Katha tells another story from beneath the glorious epic of the Mahabharata. Hidimba is a demoness from Mahabharata who was only mentioned twice in the epic. It seems that the great poet Vyasa did not have enough space for Hidimba after writing eighteen ‘parva’s praising Pandavas, the righteous ones against the evil Kauravas. In ‘Atho Hidimba Katha’ Hidimba herself comes up with her own version of the epic on behalf of the marginalized people whose presence are never mentioned in history. While telling her story of the jungle life as a part of the mother nature, she brings out the parallel story of her mistrust, pain and deprivation which do not agree to the most accepted narrative of the epic itself.
On Stage: Antara Mukherjee, Atasi Das, Titas Dutta, Nabadeepa Ghosh, Modhurima Tarafder, Reshmi Mukherjee, Satakshi Nandy, Sutapa Chaterjee, , Sudakshina Chowdhury, Shritama Chatterjee
Back Stage: Gargi Banerjee, Ipsita Chaterjee, Nirnimesh Bhattacharya, Pamela Datta, Panchali Kar,
Mome Bhattacharya, Sourami Mukherjee, Suramya Dutta, Labanya Dey
Light design and operation: Utsarjana Mutsuddi
Backdrop Design: Chandranath Saha (Tilak)
Music training collection and design: Ipsita Bhattacharya, Sutapa Chaterjee and Titas Dutta
Movement design and training: Satakshi Nandy and Madhyama Halder
Documentation: Anish Bhuniya, Abhijit Bhuniya, Arijit Kundu and Kaahon
Production manager: Dwaipayan Banerjee
Performance devised by members of Samuho
Text compilation, editing, performance text, design and direction by Titas Dutta
Subtitle: Shritama Halder
A Creation of Samuho
Tickets are available at: https://linktr.ee/Artsforward?fbclid=IwAR17RakZZA0ZSxVs9gTNzFj55vnJwHpL8a750Fnno9ZguX0vHUQm2XG46sY
Paramita Saha, Director, Artsforward says: ‘The Artsforward team remains grateful to you for your warm support to our initiative At the Still Point. Truly at this time, the arts can survive and continue to nourish and inspire our societies and communities because of wonderful people like you who make it a point to contribute to making what is yours. This is the 10th year of Artsforward and to be able to curate and present work made by women at this time is particularly special for us.’ Publicity : Supreeta Singh.
