Most awaited Indian festival, Kalaa Utsavam is around the corner. This year looks promising with women ruling the fair with a range of spectacular performances starting from 18th Nov.
Kalaa Utsavam, Esplanade’s Indian Festival of Arts is celebrating its 15th edition and is inspired by powerful women. Performances like Stree Shakti which can mesmerise any audience, to the famous play Bikhre Bimb – Broken Images, and Pooja Nansi’s one woman show – You Are Here, are few of the major highlights of the fest.
Stree Shakti – home-made in Singapore by Bharathaa Arts, is a dance show woven around three magnificent muses of India’s epic literature – Savitri, Kannagi (from the Tamil epic Silappadhikaram) and Gandhari, the blindfolded mother of the Kaurava princes in the Mahabharata.
Veteran Indian actress Arundhati Nag takes the stage for the play Bikhre Bimb – Broken Images. The Hindi-play is travelling overseas for the first time and the best part is that it is being subtitled in English – which means nearly anyone on the island can catch it. Nag plays a novelist who questions her identity and rootedness to language after a novel she writes in English gains her fame.
Singapore artist Pooja Nansi presents a refreshed and expanded version of her one-woman show- You Are Here, with stories and poetry that explore her family history and experiences growing up in Singapore.
While celebrating womanhood, the festival brings a divine blend of traditional and contemporary arts.
Local artists will present music performances every evening at the Esplanade Concourse – from music featuring traditional instruments such as the sitar and the Indian drum, mridangam, to fusion performances involving instruments from other cultures and Bollywood music.
Some of the programmes in the 9-day festival doesn’t require any fee.