Base Notes - The Sangeet Natak Akademi undergoes the rites of passage

The Sangeet Natak Akademi undergoes the rites of passage
- Shanta Serbjeet Singh, New Delhi
e-mail: shanta.serbjeetsingh@gmail.com

July 1, 2009

The old order changeth, yielding place....

After five years, the country's premier performance arts body, The Sangeet Natak Akademi, is all set to get a new Governing Council and a new Executive. This process begins soon after the General Elections, (provided they run par course) with the nomination of five names by the Government. The outgoing Culture Minister Ambika Soni seems to have signed in the five she chose almost as she shifted office from one wing of Shastri Bhavan to another (she is the new Information & Broadcasting Minister). They are Dr. Kiran Seth, fountainhead of SPIC-MACAY, Geeta Chandran, Bharatanatyam dancer and activist, Raja Reddy, Kuchipudi doyen, Vijay Kitchlew, founder of the ITC Sangeet Research Academy, Kolkata and the Jt. Secretary, Dept. of Culture, Shri NC Goel, as the ex-officio member. The present Chairman, Ram Niwas Mirdha, will continue for another year so as to complete his full five years, having come in a year later, in 2005, after the Amrit Manthan caused by the dismissal of then Chairperson, Sonal Mansingh.

SNA watchers will miss the perspicacious, tireless theatreman, the Vice Chairman, Kavalam Narayan Pannikar.Also many state representatives like the evergreen GS Channi, Chairman of the Punjab SNA. He will be replaced by Bhai Baldeep Singh, the maverick singer and archivist of Gurbani, nominated by the Badal Government.Some others like Kamal Tiwari, however, a theatre person, nominated as before from Haryana, will hopefully help with the concept of continuity.

It is festival time again.The Festival in Russia, to last for all of one year, began in mid-June at the Bric Summit in Ekaterinburg in Russia with young Yamini Reddy, daughter and disciple of the no-introductions-needed Kuchipudi exponents, Raja and Radha Reddy having the honour to perform at the inaugural concert before the Indian Prime Minister, Manmohan Singh and the Russian President Vladimir V Putin. The BRIC countries, (Brazil, Russia, India, China) account for 42 percent of the world's population and we lay great store by cultural exchanges with them. In fact the next mega festival that ICCR is putting together is in China, sometime in spring 2010.

Of the over 80 concerts planned for Russia are those by the violin maestro L Subramaniam, who performed on the 1st June in Moscow. Those by Malavika Sarukkai, vocalist Madhup Mudgal, puppeteer Dadi Padamjee, Rock Band Indian Ocean / Parikrama, Bharatanatyam dancer Ananda Shankar Jayant, dancer Tanushree Shankar, magician PC Sarkar Jr, and Amjad Ali Khan will happen as the year rolls by.

Next on the anvil is a mega festival in China beginning in spring 2010 and an even bigger one in America, from 1st March to 20th March 2011.
Watch this space for details.

Responses

Shanta Serbjeet Singh, for twenty-five years, columnist, critic and media analyst for The Hindustan Times, The Economic Times and The Times of India, India's most important mainstream English dailies, is the recipient of the Lifetime Achievement Award of the Sangeet Natak Akademi, the premier Government cultural institution of India in 2000 and the same from Delhi Govt.'s Sahitya Kala Parishad in 2003 for her contribution to the field of culture.

She is on the Central Audition Board of Doordarshan, India's national television, as well as the selection committees of several prestigious government bodies involved in culture such as The Indian Council for Cultural Relations and the Department of Culture. She was a member of the Tenth Five Year Plan Committee for Cultural Policy and of the First National Advisory Committee of the Ministry of Tourism and Culture.

Singh has authored several best selling books on Indian arts such as 'Indian Dance: The Ultimate Metaphor,' 'The 50th Milestone: A Feminine Critique,' 'Nanak, The Guru' and 'America and You' (22 editions).

As elected Chairperson of APPAN (The Asia-Pacific Performing Arts Network) for the past nine years, she has individually organized and helped her team of eminent artistes to organize eight international symposiums and festivals in several Asian countries and in the United States. APPAN, set up in 1999 by UNESCO, has, with the collaboration of UNESCO, pioneered the concept of delivering stress therapy, in particular in disaster-prone situations such as the tsunami and earthquake victims. The pilot project of this series was done under her leadership in four Asian countries after the tsunami of 2005 and another for the cyclone affected of Myanmar in 2008. Singh is the founder-Secretary of The World Culture Forum –India and Director of WCF-India's first Global WCF to be held in New Delhi in 2011.