Performing Arts - Dance and Theater - in Bangalore

Imagine a place far from the hurly burly of the city where the skies are vast and the stars shine close, where a full moon night is as bright as a cricket stadium lit for a day/night match, where you wake to the sound of the birds and watch the light change through the day on a riotous bouganvillea bush. And where the food you eat -- the dals, the veggies, the herbs -- is grown a few hundred yards from where you live.

Imagine this place inviting artists to live and work in an independent residential space, whether they come as part of a writers' residency or as a theatrical collaboration. Imagine, further, that this space is home to a small community of Odissi dancers who live, work and rehearse together and love interacting with other creative energies.

Imagine what this space might do for the arts in a city that is short on space, long on traffic and bursting with exuberant artistic talent. If you can hold all this in your head at the same time, you have some approximation of ArtsLab at Nrityagram, just outside Bangalore.

Sangam House (an international writers' residency programme) had the good fortune of being the first occupants of the ArtsLab at Nrityagram, "the dance village," founded in 1990 by the dancer Protima Bedi. She envisioned it as a place that would house gurukuls of India's six schools of classical dance, a space of rigour and excellence, but also a space of shared experience, practice and knowledge. ArtsLab is an extension of her vision, inviting other practitioners of the arts to enrich the life of Nrityagram with their work and to be simultaneously enriched by Nrityagram's practice, ideas and life style.

Having moved the Sangam House residency programme there this year, I can only echo the sentiments of the fifteen writers that were there -- from as diverse places as Brazil and Finland, Chennai and Lucknow -- all of whom found genuine respite and therefore, the time to write in the company of their peers in a physical space that was brimming with creativity. Nrityagram includes its transient population in its tightly scheduled days -- we have a late lunch every day with the dancers, we can watch their daily rehearsals, or join their yoga sessions every morning. And they come to our home readings, we overeat at slow barbecues, we celebrate local and international festivals together with food and drink in each others’ living spaces.

But more than all this or perhaps because of all this, since ArtsLab opened last November, those of us who live in Bangalore and work in the arts are asked now to think in radically new ways about how we interact with each other and where we locate ourselves when we produce our work. What does it mean when a fully formed and profoundly disciplined artistic community invites us to share a physical and emotional space? What does it mean when we, whether we work alone as writers or as part of an ensemble, are offered both a quiet, private space as well as several rehearsal/practise spaces? How do we respond to the opportunity of being in close proximity with a creative commune? And are we prepared for how it may change our work?

ArtsLab is new, it formally opened its doors mere months ago, in November 2010. As I write this, there have been only two residential programmes that have occupied the sweet and low building where the day is punctuated by the light playing on the floor of the breezy, common living space. Those of us who live in Bangalore have not yet understood or come to terms with the impact that a space like this -- and the inclusionary attitude -- could have on us: on how we think about our work, and how we practise it.

Writers who were part of the Sangam House residency are eloquent about the beneficial creative effects of the experience. Anil Yadav says, ‘At Nrityagram I felt blockages in the mind breaking which were preventing me from writing since last four years!’ Deepika feels that ‘being at Sangam House meant understanding how to create a space where things happen every day, even after I left. To try and take that space wherever one goes. Of course, the lovely people, ochre doors, wooden beams, and goodness of spirit will be hard to recreate -- but that is the wonder of Sangam House that seems both fleeting and long, all at once. I couldn't have asked for a better place than Sangam to discover and scrutinize my writing process, and to meet the people I did. My writing and I are richer for it.’

Of course, living and creating work at ArtsLab is not free. We will still need to find the financial resources required to take us into such a supportive environment. But at least now we know we have a physical space where we can take our energies and be assured of a welcome that will make us feel at home.

Arshia Sattar is a director of Sangam House, along with founding partner D. W. Gibson