Adishakti gears up for the ‘Remembering Veenapani’ festival

There are many ways to remember a mentor. This and some more are what the core team of Adishakti Theatre Arts, Auroville, achieves every year through the Remembering Veenapani Festival. The line-up includes a play in Lepcha that will have live music by Sofiyum, a Sikkimese folk fusion band; a dance-theatre production on Janabai and Lal Ded ; a gig featuring a musician and his collaborator bringing alive Hindustani poetry as contemporary music to a multi-art kaleidoscopic exploration of queer love; a play that visualises a meeting between Achilles and Arjuna to one that prods our prejudices about letting ‘the other’ into our domain; and a dance-theatre piece that imagines a 21st century Ashta Nayika to music in new voices. She experienced that “beautiful feeling of being a theatre-maker 24/7,” she says, adding how she finds “the craft of Adishakti’s work fascinating.” She has directed The Far Post, which will be part of this edition. “This year’s festival is being mapped to see how more audience-members can be accommodated in the coming years,” says Vinay.