Attakkalari Centre for Movement Arts

Bangalore based Attakkalari has become pivotal in Indian Performance and multimedia art. Dubbed as the Centre for Movement Arts, Attakkalari has become one of the most prominent Indian art institutions that cuts across geographical and cultural boundaries. www.artconcerns.com gives an offbeat picture of Attakkalari.

Attakkalari Centre for Movement Arts is a one of its kind organization in India creating a context for the development of contemporary cultural expressions, particularly in the performance arts, by facilitating new expressions in dance and digital arts across the country. Envisaged as a resource centre for upcoming artists, Attakkalari enables collaborations in an international context through residencies and training opportunities.

Attakkalari has its own repertory dance company, which performs works by Indian and international choreographers. Attakkalari’s productions are at the forefront of the contemporary Indian dance scene and often incorporate cutting-edge digital arts, imaginative lighting and innovative music. The repertory company’s latest work, PURUSHARTHA, is a pan Asian collaborative project choreographed by Artistic Director - Jayachandran Palazhy with Japanese artists Kunihiko Matsuo (digital art & interactive technology), Mitsuaki Matsumoto (sound design & music composition) and architect Naoki Hamanaka (light & set design). PURUSHARTHA had an extremely successful European tour with performances at the Bonn Biennale, the Venice Biennale, the Frankfurt Book Fair, the Bologna Festival of Contemporary Dance, the International Festival of Contemporary Dance in Munich, the Poland Contemporary Dance Festival, the Dusseldorf International Dance Festival and the Monaco Dance Forum.

Totally committed to arts education and spreading the reach of dance within the community, Attakkalari’s artistic director Jayachandran Palazhy has worked globally to promote movement arts education.  With the growing awareness of multiple intelligences, it has become important to recognize that musical, emotional, visual-spatial, kinesthetic, inter-personal and intra-personal intelligence are just as important as verbal and mathematical intelligence in the holistic development of a child and thereby society as a whole. Attakkalari is perhaps the only centre in India that has created a space for contemporary movement arts within schools, colleges, and the community.

Established in 2002, Attakkalari’s Education Outreach Programme aims to integrate the movement arts into the mainstream education system and in the process to reach out to all sections of society. Through this programme, trained facilitators conduct ongoing classes and workshops in movement arts in schools, colleges and for the community.

Attakkalari has engaged in numerous research projects and perhaps the most exhaustive and extensive of these has been NAGARIKA. Derived from the Sanskrit word meaning ‘a civilizational dimension’, NAGARIKA is an Integrated Information System on Indian Physical Expressions through technology. The project compiles and categorizes movement sequences of two specific Indian movement traditions – the classical dance form of Bharatanatyam and the martial art form from Kerala - Kalarippayattu.

NAGARIKA is the first such initiative in India in the field of traditional performing arts. The interactive DVD on Bharatanatyam is ready and contains high quality images of the masters and young artists in action, detailed interviews, contextual information, analysis and explanation of principles of the movement language of the dance form. A user will be able to navigate through this information in a customized manner. This DVD will be available for distribution later this year.

For the second part of the NAGARIKA series, the DVD on Kalaripayyattu, Attakkalari has already conducted field studies with several masters to understand the form and its history in detail. We have now identified masters for detailed recording and already completed parts of the recording. We have also gathered the manuscript of the compilation of ‘Waytharis’ (verbal commands) and created a transcript in English.

Determined to extend the reach of Contemporary Dance in India, in September 2006 Attakkalari launched its most ambitious and strategic project to date – the Diploma in Movement Arts and Mixed Media. Envisaged as the motor that will propel most of Attakkalari’s future activities, the mandate of the diploma is to spread both the reach and awareness of Contemporary Dance in India and address the need for well-trained and informed dancers with a contemporary South Asian aesthetic.

The curriculum has been calibrated with care and is designed to provide a unique balance of various Indian physical and performance traditions and aesthetics with contemporary dance, ballet, contact improvisation, choreography and developments in lighting, stagecraft and digital technology besides critical theory and arts management, the outcome will be dancers who are technically sound, strong performers adept in varied movement approaches.  Academic subjects like Art History, Philosophy, Pedagogy, and Anatomy are also included in the curriculum. Besides the three-year diploma, Attakkalari also offers a year-long certification programme.

As a public charitable trust, all our work at Attakkalari is made possible because of the support we receive from funding bodies, the government, individuals, corporates and society at large.

On March 17th 2007, Attakkalari will present to Bangalore audiences SANCHARI – a scintillating evening of contemporary dance, choreographed martial arts, live music & visual projections. All proceeds from the show will go towards our Education Outreach programme to enable us to extend our work to include even more children from the underprivileged sections of society.