The Paradise Factory in Lower Manhattan, one of New York City’s oldest neighborhoods, will come to life Sept. 26 with an array of dance, music, theatre and comedy by South Asian Artists, courtesy the Hypokrit Theatre Company.
Along with James Jay Dudley Luce Foundation, the Hypokrit Theatre, founded by Arpita Mukherjee and Shubhra Prakash, will resent the festival christened Tamasha 2016. The event will be held from Sept. 26 to October 2.
“We are providing a platform for artists from around the world so they can express themselves, and support them to find their voices. Unlike many other such festivals, the difference here is that we don’t curate the festival. We just want our artists to try things and also learn how to put up a show,” Delhi-born Mukherjee, who has worked for years with Washington D.C.-based Shakespeare Theater Company, told Desi Talk in an interview.
“It is a platform for free-flowing forms and ideas,” Mukherjee, who founded the Hypokrit Theatre Company in New York in 2014 along with Shubhra Prakash, said. Both of them are former chairs of the South Asian International Performing Arts Festival.
In Tamasha’s inaugural year, artists from the minority communities and first and second generation immigrants will express themselves through a variety of art forms. The festival includes over 100 artists, including South Asians, most of them living in the U.S. The idea is to provide up-and-coming artists of South Asian origin to connect and collaborate and to ensure that each individual’s voice can be heard through their collective artistic efforts.
The artists will do 30 different productions, including play, ballet and music, sometimes different forms combining into one single production. The artists from the South Asian diaspora are mostly New York-based, but there are some groups that are coming from other cities like Chicago for the festival.
The festival will also address some of the social issues affecting the South Asian community in the U.S. For instance, Shivali Bhammer, a New Yorker, has written a play called ‘Borders in a Bedroom’ which addresses the issue of inter-religious marriage between a Hindu and a Muslim. Borders in a Bedroom centers around a couple, Maya and Imran, and how deeply- entrenched views about the complexities of the outside world can permeate even the most intimate of relationships. In the play they talk about the larger issues of the world, and specifically how it is like to be a Muslim in the United States right now. “The two-person play is very topical, very political, in the current situation” Mukherjee said.
There is also a young New York University graduate student, Mayadevi Ross, who has written a play about what it is like to be a half-Indian-half American Black person, and how does he or she come to terms with the reality. Then, there is a dance piece on sexual assault on campuses in the U.S., an issue that is pertinent in the world of today,” Delhi-born Mukherjee, who is a writer, director, producer and choreographer, said.
“I like the nature of the festival which is going to be eclectic and crazy, and it is an interesting bag. We want to be on the edgy side and crazy. A lot of South Asian activists are talking about social issues. We definitely want to highlight those rather than just portraying our community as a model minority community merged with the mainstream,” Mukherjee said.
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