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 Premiere of Palimpsest Photos: Ajesh Narayanan March 28, 2023 The Natya STEM Dance Kampni premiered its new production Palimpsest at Bangalore International Centre as the headline act of the Future Fantastic festival that took place over the last weekend of March. Future Fantastic was India's first tech art festival and was dedicated to the theme of climate change. Palimpsest, therefore, needed to address the two major global forces impacting us today-climate change and artificial intelligence. To do this, choreographer Madhu Nataraj collaborated with artists with different specialisations both in India and abroad, to create an avant-garde work of dance theatre that urged people to take collective action on climate change. A palimpsest is an object, usually a scroll or document, that has been reused or altered but still bears visible traces of its earlier forms. The earth is human beings' most valuable palimpsest that contains and documents our actions as a species. It has survived many crises, each one etched into its spatial and temporal layers. The production Palimpsest traces our relentless march into the 21st century enforcing successive layers of environmental change, often resulting in desecration of the earth. It highlights how we can only survive this crisis in the Anthropocene, if we must act in consonance with nature. It reminds us how a changing climate and shifting world has left behind myriad climate migrants and refugees. But in their voices we hear the potency of the natural elements-the cornerstones of philosophies from around the world-that must be our guide to rejuvenation and regeneration. Slide show 
The cornerstones of Palimpsest are two dance sequences by the Natya STEM Dance Kampni, both in the Indian contemporary dance vocabulary developed by Madhu Nataraj. The first sequence evokes the transition from treading lightly on the earth to us scouring the earth with our carbon footprints. In the second sequence, the dancers invoke the elemental beauty of water by reacting to AI-generated music and visuals created by Jiayu Liu studios in Beijing. Jiayu is a media artist known for her immersive and evocative media installations, often recreating the natural world and focuses on relationships between humans, nature, and the lived environment. In a third section, singer and actor MD Pallavi sings a Baul song, shared with Madhu Nataraj, by renowned artiste Parvathy Baul, which reminds us of the people who have been displaced in one of the most climate-change affected places in India-the Sundarbans. The haunting song is accompanied by AI-generated photorealist images of displaced people created by photographer and filmmaker Sam Mohan. Other collaborators in the project include music composer Dheerendra Doss and photographer and filmmaker Bhushan Bagadia. The performance included Roopa K, Adrika Subhash, Deeksha Kumar and Yonita Jain. Scripting team was made up of Harsh Purohit of Cognito, Nayantara N with Madhu Nataraj. Kampni's Keerthi Kumar was tech director for the production and co-composed music for the prologue. Costumes were designed by Madhu Nataraj and Ramya Nagaraj. The production consulted eminent researchers TV Ramachandra at the Indian Institute of Science and Harini Nagendra at the Azim Premji University, among others, on current issues in climate change. The Future Fantastic festival was organised by the UK-based arts foundation Future Everything and the Bangalore-based tech arts platform called BeFantastic curated by Jaaga, which builds and supports collaborative communities of creatives. |
