Mumbai's NCPA turns 50 and is throwing a cultural extravaganza to celebrate

NCPA will showcase old favourites and new productions in a festival marking the Mumbai culture venue's 50-year-old history

Plans for the National Centre for Performing Arts (NCPA) had been afoot when Khushroo Suntook began working for the Tata companies in the late 1960s. He remembers its founder Jamshed Bhabha and JRD Tata in discussion, picking out only the very best people for the job of building a cultural centre — Philip Johnson, a giant of modern American architecture, and the acoustician Cyril Harris, an authority on shaping concert hall sound. NCPA was opened by Indira Gandhi in 1969, and when they added the Tata Theatre in 1980, it was designed such that “you could hear a whisper sitting in the last”, says Suntook, who took over as chairman in 2008. Bhabha did not believe in having microphones.

That changed in later years, of course. Microphones are “a way of life” now, notes the chairman. Such small and big episodes of change in the venue have been visiting Suntook’s mind as it completes 50 years this year. In a three-day festival starting November 29, curators will present the full range of performing arts that have since been brought into the fold. So, stand-up comedy and spoken word shows will share space in the programme with Indian and Western classical recitals. 

Two deeply personal dance acts will mark the festival opening. In Unbroken and Unbowed, contemporary dance maestro Astad Deboo will weave four quotes by Mahatma Gandhi together with his own journey in the last five decades. The deification of women — from mythological figures like Savitri and Sita to contemporary ones like Jayalalithaa — is central to Mallika Sarabhai’s In Search of the Goddess. She will take a serious but wry look at why some women become goddesses and some don’t, employing the classical dance forms of Bharatanatyam and Kuchipudi. 

Arturo Sandoval

Because her mother Mrinalini, the Bharatanatyam and Kathakali choreographer, had been roped in by Bhabha to develop the vision for NCPA’s dance activities, Sarabhai was present at a lot of events there growing up. With a little chuckle, she recalls the inauguration of the Tata Theatre, also by Indira Gandhi, during which the shehnai virtuoso Bismillah Khan had performed and “nearly fallen off” the swanky new stage when it rotated. Everyone agrees the resolve of the founder, Bhabha, was admirable. When the Jamshed Bhabha Theatre caught fire in 1997, he quietly set about having it reconstructed so that it was ready to open again two years later. 

Dancer Mallika Sarabhai

NCPA has played a significant role in creating and preserving culture. At 50 years, it is still young, but it was the first cultural centre in South Asia to boast multiple venues with multiple purposes. Under Bhabha, the institution began a sound library, recording more than 6,000 hours of music by maestros such as Bismillah Khan, Allarakha Khan and Ravi Shankar. This archive has been studied by scholars including from the University of Amsterdam who tried with uneven success to document Hindustani music in Western musical notation. After Bhabha’s death in 2007, Suntook took over and one of his cherished achievements was in forming a professional orchestra in-house, the Symphony Orchestra of India (SOI). 

Musical comedy duo Igudesman & Joo

A few years ago, it began showing international plays as part of a collaboration with National Theatre Live. The hope ultimately was of improving the craft of theatre, which is not where Suntook would like it to be. “Bollywood has gone far ahead technically and of course it has the money. But the same degree of advancement has not happened in theatre.” Among the dramatic offerings in the festival is the debut of Sea Wall, a monologue in English directed by Bruce Guthrie and acted by Jim Sarbh.

Relatively newer acts like stand up have found their way into the programme. Comedian Zakir Khan will perform his new special, Tathastu. Also promising is the musical comedy duo Igudesman & Joo whose trademark is to combine classical music with exaggerated humour about everything that can go wrong during a recital. 

Santoor player Shiv Kumar Sharma

For connoisseurs of Indian classical, Shiv Kumar Sharma, Hariprasad Chaurasia and Rashid Khan will take to the stage on different days of the festival. The final day will feature dance and music acts from Morn to Dusk including Ajoy Chakrabarty of the Patiala Gharana and Birju Maharaj. And in the closing performance, traditional folk musicians from Jaisalmer will put up Roysten Abel’s production, The Manganiyar Seduction, which has travelled as far as the Kennedy Center in Washington D C and the Barbican Centre in London. When Abel first created this show in 2006, the Manganiyars had never done anything like stage rehearsals but they are born performers, he says. 

Like several festivals of late, this one too will attempt to go eco-friendly. There are also photo exhibitions. While tickets to the performances range from Rs 500 to Rs 5,000, entry into outdoor areas and some of the workshops is free. Suntook admits the work of juggling various arts so that they get the same importance is a delicate one. NCPA is attempting to plan events such that they are spaced out and don’t strain the budgets of patrons. The intention is to get “audiences as diverse as the performers”.
 

The NCPA ADD ART Festival will take place at the Nariman Point, Mumbai venue from Nov 29 to Dec 1, 2019