NEW LANGUAGE OF CREATING ART

The sixth physical edition of the Serendipity Arts Festival will prompt visitors to unlearn set ways of engaging with and creating art to allow for newer languages to emerge

- Avantika Bhuyan

Words like "un-theatre", "non-dance" and "poetry of food" come to the fore while speaking to the 10 curators of the Serendipity Arts Festival. Each year, the annual eventheld in Panjim, Goa, in December-focuses on interdisciplinarity of art forms, ranging from music, dance, theatre, food, and craft to visual arts. In the sixth physical edition-being held across venues in the sunshine state till 23 December-this idea has been taken a notch further.

Through collaborations and dialogue, you can see an unlearning taking placeof set ways of engaging with and creating art to allow for newer languages to emerge. So, you have the centuries-old mobile folk art form of kaavad katha from Rajasthan come together with the classical dance form of Mohiniyattam in the piece Manthan to create a new form of storytelling. Or you have plays and performances finding home in unlikely spaces such as on rooftops and in parking lots.

The festival seeks to offer a new lens of looking at the world around us through 150 such events, works by over 300 artists and 15 commissioned projects. "Art in every form stands as a potent and transformative tool to illuminate changes or events that reflect the cultural churns a society is undergoing," says Smriti Rajgarhia, director, Serendipity Arts Foundation. "A festival like ours gives us a wonderful opportunity to focus on these pertinent conversations and showcase them through visual or performing arts."

One of the focus areas this year is sustainability, which is being manifested across different segments. For instance, the culinary arts curation, put together by chef Thomas Zacharias and his team at The Locavore, an initiative to champion regional food through storytelling, recipes and events, is advocating "doing good through food" through an array of sub-themes such as zero-waste cooking, agrobiodiversity, food heritage, food memories, and community.