Finding a new stage

Darshan Grover, a 70-year-old resident of Pitampura area in west Delhi, has watched several plays and theatre performances in her life, but only earlier this month did she get to take part in a theatre workshop. “It was a whole new experience and quite exciting,” she says. “We have had several performances here, but this was the first time a group of young people conducted a workshop in our area.”

The theatre workshop was part of the Lost and Found festival held over the last few weeks at various venues across Delhi, including the community halls at Pitampura, Vasant Kunj and Sarita Vihar. These three neighbourhoods, for instance, are located far from the city’s epicentre of arts and cultural venues — Delhi’s Mandi House area. “Our idea was to move away from the usual audiences and take the performing arts to places where people seldom get to experience it,” says Mallika Taneja, a 30-year-old Delhi-based performance artist and the brain behind the festival. “I thought it was a good way to decentralise art, so the idea is to have dance, theatre and music within walking distance and give people easy access to them.”

Her long-cherished idea came to fruition during her residency as an Art Think South Asia fellow — an arts management programme organised by the Goethe Institut, the British Council and Delhi-based Khoj International Artists’ Association. Thanks to funding from the Goethe Institut and the Delhi-based Tejeshwar Singh Memorial Trust, she was able to put the festival together this year.

Beginning November 1, over 15 days, Taneja and crew organised theatre, music, dance and wall-art workshops. More than 120 people across neighbourhoods took part. The youngest participant was eight and the oldest well above 70. Each workshop was conducted by specialists in that field, including professionally trained dancers from the Gati dance forum and theatre professionals from the Tadpole Repertory. Each community hall hosted evening performances by members of the Delhi-based fusion band Advaita, dance shows and a Dastangoi performance.

Taneja hopes the success of the festival’s inaugural edition will lay the ground for similar events in the future. “I am not sure about other urban centres, but in Delhi I don’t think anyone is looking at new spaces or trying to generate new audiences,” she says. “The point is to go out there and say, ‘you know what, you’re an audience’ and get a person involved; that’s all it takes really.”