How would your creative expression be enriched if you are given the freedom to dabble without restrictions in the medium you love? Perch’s Take Flight programme offered a grant for young artistes to achieve just that.
The 10-year-old Chennai-based performance collective — remembered for productions such as Under the Mangosteen Tree and Kira Kuzhambu — wanted the grantees to engage with abstract themes while working in a supportive environment. Anushka Meenakshi, a member of Perch, explains, “The idea was to create an extension of how we function as a collective. To see if the things that have worked for us — sharing works in progress with audiences, for instance — could help these artistes too.”
From a pool of 25 applicants, seven were chosen to receive a grant of ₹30,000 each, along with mentorship and feedback (where requested). This weekend, five of the projects will be on display for the public, all of them emphatically labelled ‘works in progress’.
Reading between the lines
The projects traverse different media, smudging conventional borders that separate art forms. Take, for instance, Aditi Bheda’s contemporary dance presentation, Gestures of Belonging, which explores the concept of touch as a comforting gesture. It is about how a body recreates a sense of home and belonging around itself through touch, says Bheda, adding, “Our hands are extraordinarily expressive; I have always been fascinated by the myriad nuances contained in each gesture.”
For Vijay Ravikumar, who will stage a puppetry and dance performance, inspiration comes from a poem, specifically Women Cleaning Lentils by Armenian writer, Zahrad.
He recalls how he fell in love with the poem after his friend read it out to him. The reader has to fill in all the gaps — the poem is more of a scaffold — which is perhaps why it feels so universal, says Ravikumar.
“These thoughts feel too general and distilled. This is where puppetry becomes a powerful medium for me, by giving a physical life to such general themes, while still leaving room for the viewer’s imagination to root it all in specific experiences.”
Breaking boundaries
A video installation by dancer Ramya Shanmugam called Jasmine Village explores the politics of creativity, collective desires and the unpredictable gyration of the worlds surrounding it. The project starts with a virtual reality installation, which serves as a precursor to a linear film screening inside the auditorium.
Plant-well by Charanya Khandhadai and Richhardo Alson features ceramic sculptures inspired by step wells and courtyards. Meanwhile, The Odds by Thomas Manuel and Ujwal Nair is a series of podcasts in a recording booth, exploring the compromises artists make. With all the pieces, what you can expect is a break from conventional definitions of gallery art and an exploration of radical themes of commercialisation.
Take Flight will be on display at Goethe Institut Max Mueller Bhavan, Nungambakkam, today and tomorrow, from 6 pm. Free entry.
With inputs from Sindhuri Nandhakumar