Bouquet of art & culture

This edition of Hyderabad Literary Festival saw an opportunity for lot of young and old people from Hyderabad and India to participate in many inter-disciplinary activities of art and culture. The Children’s Fine Art Gallery set up by Daira Centre for Art and Culture conducted art workshops including ‘concept art’, which gave clues to the participants to do creative work.

Bhudan Theatre from a village near Ahmedabad presented a play ‘Choli Ke Pichhe Kya Hai’, which was a tribute to well-known literary personality Mahasweta Devi. ‘Karmic Harvest’, was a cultural presentation by the contingent from the country partner ‘Phillipines’.

This included participation in poetry, dance and music by Cecill Artates, Dumay Solinggay, Jeena Rani Marquez, Kooky Tuason, Marty Tengco and Vim Nadera. Hyderabad-based theatre group Shudraka gave a short performance of Bengali theatre while Tishani Doshi spoke about her journey of becoming an accidental dancer under the tutelage of the famous dancer ‘Chandralekha’.

‘Silambam’ a great meditative martial art form that requires tremendous control physically and mentally was performed by Aishwarya Manivannan and her team. This had weapons like ‘vel kambu’ (spear), ‘maan kombu maduvu’ (deer horn), ‘vaal veechu’ (sword) and ‘surul vaal (metal whip), which were being moved manually at tremendous speed without any fear.

Shamir Tandon brought in three members of the ‘transgender’ six pack band, who have had many opportunities as musicians and dancers in the Bollywood industry fraternity and also with well known musicians like Sonu Nigam.

Daira also went on to showcase the unique style of a well-known painter of the Telangana region Thota Vaikuntam through the ‘facial makeup’ and dress of young children, who for a second looked nothing short of coming out of the painting frames ‘alive’. ‘Oggu Dolu’ was the grand finale dance of Telangana, which concluded the festival with vigour and valour.

By Jaywant Naidu