Antara Collective

When air carries the smell of ripening chikus 😍

What the dancer needs to articulate is what really draws her to move and dance. Dancers keep dancing, and what keeps them dancing is not that the dance originates in the Natyashastra, or from a Devadasi tradition. When the dancer dances, the movement cuts across all these categories and exists in the body of the dancer at the present moment. The feeling is immediate and even its past can be accessed only in the present continuous tense. The dancer embodies the dance and its history. Even the most ‘fossilized’ of dance forms does not become brittle and break because the dancer’s muscle and bone and blood gives it life and shape. Hence to dance is and has always been a humanizing experience and cannot be otherwise. What is lost is the space to acknowledge that and the vocabulary to articulate it.

http://www.india-seminar.com/semframe.html

"Dance is perhaps one of the most basic ways in which we can connect with the notion that abstraction can be a physical process, just as neuroscience is telling us that thought and mind are rooted in the physical."

http://www.india-seminar.com/2015/676/676_aparna_u_banerjee.htm

676 Aparna Uppaluri Banerjee, Dance without moving CAN I dance without moving? Seemed like an absurd question to ask myself as I lay in a hospital bed hours after my daughter was born. It was 40 degrees below zero and the wind was howling; my breath had frosted over on the windowpanes. No amount of insulation and heating could keep that bitter cold…

Antara (meaning interiority) is a space where one can introspectively engage with one’s body and become aware of all that it carries or embodies, including one’s (personal and collective) thoughts, feelings, identities, histories, memories, politics, health and everything in-between all of these.

Practice as Inquiry
We are trying to build reflexivity and gentleness into the ways in which one thinks about and treats one's body. Practicing, teaching and learning embodied arts such as dance, music, pottery, puppetry, yoga and writing are our primary modes of engagement with the body and oneself. Though passing on of knowledge/skills does happen in the context of “classes”, we think of teaching and learning as a shared experience. We feel that arts education is being mainstreamed for the wrong reasons, namely to display, rather than to inquire. We are hence deeply invested in encouraging an inquiry based sharing of artistic knowledge from person to person.

Research as Practice
As a collective, we are working towards shifting at the paradigm of art scholarship. Often, articles written and published within the academia on arts fail to cross the borders of academics and reach out to the artists, practitioners and art teachers. These academic papers then become inconsequential in kindling any interest in thought based inquiry in the popularly sought commercially driven world of dance classes, music classes, Yoga classes, fitness regimes and so on. At Antara, reading, writing, researching and articulating one’s thoughts and observations are an inseparable part of one’s learning experience. We also house a small library with handpicked books on various performing art traditions and movements, rituals, yoga and all things related.

"Aparna Uppaluri Banerjee, founder-director of Antara Collective that brought the show to the city, has been working with the family to dig deep and understand the relationship of this art form with their everyday life of the performers.
She says, “A puppeteer doesn’t see himself as just a performer. The art shapes his entire life.
The puppet enters him as much as he enters the puppet. So, he also sees himself as a storyteller, philosopher, singer, poet and performer.”
And, hence, there are multiple identities, she explains.
“To break the art of Tolubommalata down into multiple layers is what I like best,” she adds."

http://www.newindianexpress.com/cities/bengaluru/Puppets-sacred-to-700-yr-old-art/2016/07/11/article3522887.ece

Puppets sacred to 700-yr-old art - The New Indian Express BENGALURU: The Shinde family from Dharmavaram, Andhra Pradesh, presented a shadow puppet performance known as Tolubommalata recently.

Did you know? The leather bookmarks included in our were made by the Shinde Anjaneyulu family, who are performing a Tolubommalata shadow puppet show at the conference inauguration,curated by the Antara Collective

Don't miss this Creative Morning talk by Shruthi K P hosted at Antara.
https://www.facebook.com/CreativeMorningsBLR/?fref=ts

CreativeMornings Bengaluru A much needed Sunday morning, monthly, free breakfast and lecture series.
Everybody is creative, everybody is invited!

Antara teamed up with Vishaka Chanchani to introduce Tagore's music and art to the research scholars at NCBS.

https://www.facebook.com/media/set/?set=a.948659408504788.1073741839.877595742277822&type=1&l=255ddcfb3b