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During the Lockdown and Beyond June 2020 ON Stagevolume 9 • issue 11 CULTURE AT ALL TIMES During the lockdown and beyond Chairman’s Note he NCPA team, now scattered around dierent locations in Mumbai, T France, the U.K., etc., are hard at work, exchanging ideas via the internet and through the marvels of communication open to us. The aim is to primarily keep all our associates safe, to evolve ever-changing strategies due to the uncertain future we are facing, and to nally encourage our ingenuity to emerge wiser and savvier than when we dealt with normal challenges. NCPA@home is proving popular, but we still have some distance to go to be of the standard we are striving for. Various ideas are being tested to make audiences inside, outside, and at distances experience as far as possible the “real thing”, and the solutions we hope to arrive at will make us a richer and wiser organisation. The plan to reach out to various parts of the city has been welcomed. Our ocial authorities have been helpful and encouraging us to use all means to bring our unique blend of oerings to the public once the right moment arrives. Sadly, our major productions like The Merry Widow are postponed and our income from various activities will be drastically reduced. Our colleagues and sta have risen to the occasion with remarkable co-operation, and we hope all of you will join us in a grand thank-you event at the appropriate time. In the meantime, dear members and our loyal public, do stand shoulder to shoulder with us. Khushroo N. Suntook NCPA Chairman Khushroo N. Suntook Editorial Director Radhakrishnan Nair Editor Snigdha Hasan Consulting Editor Contents Vipasha Aloukik Pai Editorial Co-ordinator 14 Hilda Darukhanawalla Art Director Tanvi Shah Associate Art Director Hemali Limbachiya Graphic Designers Gautami Dave Sanjana Suvarna 22 Advertising Anita Maria Pancras essential reading to widen your ([email protected]; 66223835) Tulsi Bavishi understanding of and delve 30 ([email protected]; 9833116584) deeper into the genre. The Freedom Vector 26 On the occasion of International Senior Digital Manager Jazz Day, the NCPA brought Jayesh V. Salvi 22 together 75 artistes from around A Crisis Captured the world in a virtual multi-day As the Piramal Gallery at the celebration. Produced by NCPA prepares to host an Features exhibition that documents the Editorial Oce city battling a pandemic, we 31 4th Floor, Todi Building, bring you glimpses of what Version 2.0 Mathuradas Mills Compound, photographers from Mumbai All set to be launched on Senapati Bapat Marg, 28 of good theatre and the witnessed through their lenses. 1st June, the NCPA’s website Lower Parel, performing arts in a post- in its revamped avatar Mumbai - 400013 06 Reflections Corona world. promises easier navigation Printer Creation in isolation. 26 and better access to the latest Spenta Multimedia, Peninsula Spenta, By Anil Dharker Man of Many Firsts in the performing arts at the Mathuradas Mill Compound, 18 Cited as the first composer organisation. N. M. Joshi Marg, Lower Parel, Going Online: A New Realm to rethink every parameter of Mumbai – 400013 08 for the Performing Arts his music, Franz Liszt was an The Best of Both Worlds From what it means to perform inveterate boundary-pusher, as Materials in ON Stage cannot be 32 reproduced in part or whole without the The pause on live performances before a camera to consuming eccentric as he was prolific, and Kaleidoscope written permission of the publisher. Views at the NCPA has been a period art for free, Swapnokalpa without a doubt, the prototype Your window to the latest in the and opinions expressed in this magazine of brainstorming that has Dasgupta, Head – Programming of the modern-day rock star. performing arts across India and are not necessarily those of the publisher. resulted in innovative online (Dance), NCPA, addresses the By Manohar Parnerkar the world. All rights reserved. offerings, and the creation of a many questions that the digital strategy for times beyond the shift in cultural consumption NCPA Booking Office lockdown that celebrates the has given rise to. 2282 4567/6654 8135/6622 3724 Follow us on: www.ncpamumbai.com live medium and widens its reach digitally. By Snigdha Hasan facebook.com/NCPAMumbai 20 @NCPAMumbai On a literary note NCPAMumbai 14 From encyclopaedias and The Stage is Set biographies to tomes on youtube.com/user/TheNCPAMumbai1 Bruce Guthrie, Head of pedagogy and online Theatre & Film at the NCPA, resources, Dr. Suvarnalata Rao, talks about his vision for the Programming Head - Indian We look forward to your feedback and suggestions. Please do drop us an department, the makings Music at the NCPA, recommends KOYANDE BHUSHAN LISZT; SHUTTERSTOCK email at [email protected]. OPINION Reections Creation in isolation. By Anil Dharker “Just a reminder that when Shakespeare portraits in variegated Mexican outts by was quarantined because of the plague, which we now know her. he wrote King Lear”, someone wrote on ‘It seems to me that today if the artist Twier, creating quite a guilty storm in the wishes to be serious, he must once more West, particularly I imagine among people sink himself in solitude’, said Edgar who spend their time on Twier. Degas, the great Impressionist painter. As it happens, Shakespeare did write Yet apart from his self-portraits, what King Lear when quarantined during the is he known for? His brilliant series of Great Plague of 1606. And not just King paintings of ballet dancers and of men Lear, he also wrote Macbeth and Antony and women in cafés. Surely, he didn’t and Cleopatra. Shakespeare wrote at paint them in self-imposed quarantine. a ‘feverish’ pace most of the time (the at is the contradictory nature of the right word to use in the context?), but to creative process: you must go out into produce three great plays in just over a the hubbub of the world to experience it, year in which he was quarantined must and quarantine yourself to the connes say something for the uses of isolation. of your study to express it. Even the e place he stayed in at Silver Street in nine years. He used his periods in isolation composition of music needs this London was right across a church which to write three wonderful books: his duality: e nal version of Beethoven’s must have tolled continuously for the autobiography (a 672-page work written only opera, Fidelio, came about when he dead. No wonder all these three plays are between June 1934 and February was almost completely deaf. is must the darkest of dark tragedies. 1935), Glimpses of World History and be the ultimate example of an artiste’s We think of the plague as an epidemic e Discovery of India, a magisterial immersion in the world (Beethoven’s that came and went in a year, but in fact it work written between April and interaction with the opera company assailed England again and again for over September 1944. Years earlier, in 1897, and its singers) and his isolation (the a century. e year 1665 was one of the Oscar Wilde was jailed too, and instead composer’s deafness). A less extreme worst: it killed 100,000, a quarter of the of giving in to despair, he wrote his example is his Sixth Symphony. e population then, in a mere 18 months. most serious and heartfelt work ‘De full title is, ‘Pastoral Symphony, One of those who escaped the disease was Profundis’ (From the Depths). or Recollections of Country Life’. Isaac Newton, then a young student of ere can only be one Shakespeare Beethoven publicly declared the piece’s 24 at Cambridge University. When they and one Newton, one Nehru and one ‘extra-musical’ purpose: Expression of shut down the campus, he hurried back Wilde, but other creative people too have Nature. is is not surprising because to the family home in Woolsthorpe-by- turned the adversity of connement to he frequently le Vienna for the Colsterworth, a hamlet in Lincolnshire. their advantage. When the Norwegian countryside to go on walks by himself. ere, locked down for those 18 months, painter Edvard Munch (whose ‘Scream’ Look at the symphony’s programmatic he investigated optics and prisms and we all know) contracted the Spanish Flu, ideas – A Shepherd’s Pipe, Birds in Song, ‘voyaging through strange seas of he was in his mid-ies. Being isolated, Flowing Streams and understorm, thought alone’. ose seas brought him he had obvious limitations of subjects, and you know that these are ‘felt to the incredible shores of dierential and so he painted himself. Portrait aer self- moments’, not ideas plucked out from integral calculus which he developed, and portrait followed, the most famous being the air in a bare room. most importantly, led to his discovery of prosaically titled ‘Self Portrait with the Einstein liked to go for long walks on the the theory of gravity. ink about it, if Spanish Flu’. beach, ‘so I can listen to what is going on he had been at Cambridge following the e Mexican artist Frida Kahlo was even inside my head’. As for us, we may be alone curriculum instead of being in isolation, no more unfortunate. At 18, she was involved on the beach or walking in the countryside apple would have fallen on his head. in a terrible trac accident that le her with or in a room on Silver Street or siing under Another way of being isolated, needless a fractured spine and pelvis. Conned to an apple tree…or in a room in an apartment to say not recommended, is to be in jail.
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