About the Project "Kolkata Monodosis"

"Inspired by the diverse and exciting social life on Kolkata's pavements (much owing to the cultural practice of the hawkers who occupy it), I decided to do a project in the streets. I picked up my concept of Monodosis, which is a research on musical form and converted it into an urban space intervention. My intention was to use Monodosis as a kind of performative plug-in to the city, which reacts to the specific situation and at the same time, provokes interaction with the everyday pedestrians and hawkers. How is that done? Very simple: a solo improvising vibraphone meets urban space production.

The project could also be interpreted as a portrait of Kolkata: it works in different spaces and different levels of society. Even the instrument I use is Kolkata-specific: it is the only vibraphone in the city. In the 50s it was brought in by British jazz piano player Victor Feldmann.

Since my way of playing is very different to the culture of Kolkata, people could react to the performance without having to label it. The reactions could vary from nodding the head to the rhythm of the music, to video capturing the performance with a mobile phone, to asking questions on the performance, or just passing by, ignoring what is happening.

After each performance a dialogue with the audience unfolded. The question that came up the most was: Why do you do this? And while this question is asked, the answer is already given. The intention of Kolkata Monodosis is to raise questions on today's practice, on the use of urban space. To ask what is use or misuse, what is public and non-public.

In that way Monodosis becomes an improvisation as interaction in real-time, as constructive use of disorder in a transforming community. It strives to enable to perform, to inform and to provoke reflection on form. I hope that Improvisation Technology can open up new ways of reading and appropriating urban space in the future.

In addition to that, producing the film with Ranu Gosh, Patrick Ghose and Abdul Rajjak is not merely to be seen as a one-to-one capturing of the street interventions. The cooperation of the film team is a creative interdisciplinary process in itself, which stands for an artistic endeavor of finding an experimental form of and for its own. In this way it is opening yet another level, another dimension of possibilities for interpretations, for readings of the totality of the project."

Christopher Dell, Kolkata 13.02.08