Sadanand Menon: Need more informed arts sponsorship

CRITICALLY INCLINED

The much-celebrated 'Annual Music and Dance Festival' every December in Chennai, is increasingly like an orchestra of opposites. Here, the old obfuscates the new, the classical cohabits with kitsch, the austere is upstaged by the ambitious, the traditional is threatened by the contemporary, the prodigy slums in with its parody, the gifted defer to the greasy, and the commercial corrupts the venerable.

It is Chennai's annual December of dichotomies, in which the pious and the credulous, the amateur and the professional, the soul-pure and the techno-contaminated, the enchanting and the prosaic, the captivating and the abhorrent, the connoisseur and the dilettante, the resident and the non-resident "" are all assembled into a mega sin-phony of contraries, to briefly hold hands, lock together in a tight embrace and syncopate under the compulsive and charismatic baton of a good conductor called 'Our Culture'.

Today this entire circus in Chennai, called 'the season', is a gigantic pageant of contradictions. On the one hand is the tyranny of quantities and numbers. In a span of 55 days from late November to late January, some 350 musicians, dancers, scholars will present over 2,400 performances and lecture-demonstrations at 28 venues, under the aegis of some 85 organisations, sponsored by up to 200 state, corporate and private agencies, together toting up a combined kitty of (at a conservative estimate) almost Rs 2 crore.

On the other hand, quantity belies quality. Lucky are those who might manage to catch even half-a-dozen high standard cutcheris in an ambience that serves up the Bhairavis and Kalyanis and Karaharapriyas like quick-fix dosas at a fast-food stall. Of the 28 venues, only eight qualify as passably authentic performance venues.

The others are dreary tin, zinc and asbestos arenas with artful thermocol panels as concession to visual appeal and ramshackle stages. Being democratic in their taste, they honour street sounds and blaring loudspeakers from neighbouring temples as much as that of the vidwan's on stage and, for our amusement, even manipulate the pre-World War II sound equipment to periodically throttle or muffle the ethereal aspirations of a Mayamalavagowla or a Shudha Saveri.

Of the 85-odd organisations, eight are of almost 50 years or more vintage, their attitude to the arts too remaining petrified somewhere close to the dates of their origin. Sri Parthasarathy Sabha is the oldest at a round 107, the Music Academy 81, The Indian Fine Arts Society 75, the Tamil Isai Sangham 65, the Mylapore Fine Arts 56, the Sri Krishna Gana Sabha 52 and the Narada Gana Sabha 49.

If these sabhas began once as part of nationalist aspirations, on a polemical high of 'cultural recovery' and 'cultural assertion', they have regressed today to a timid, though insular closure, barricading their fossilised notions of 'tradition' from the ravages of a rapidly changing society and an even more rapidly changing attitude to music.

The real issue, though, is around the sponsorship funds that, despite generous inflows, do not seem to be able to make any difference to the situation. What the scene perhaps needs is urgent co-operativising and rationalising. It wouldn't be at all difficult to affiliate all the sabhas, big and small, into a federation that can then set up a panel of experts or even a single curator or director "" like at the Avignon Festival in France (the only other comparable festival on this scale) "" who could plan events, themes, artists, venues, dates, timings for each sabha or venue so as to make virtually each performance a 'must-see-event'.

A co-operative approach could also lead to annual earmarking of specific amounts by rotation to each venue for improving infrastructure and facilities to benefit artists, audiences and the environment of the arts in general. Facilities and conveniences like good seating, rest rooms, toilets, acoustics, lighting, stage floor, green rooms, rehearsal studios, teaching/ training/research/documentation possibilities, printed literature, a festival magazine, discussions and face-to-face with the artists are all necessary ingredients today to any coherent use of public space.

It would also help in setting up scholarships, welfare schemes, endowments, printing literatures related to the arts in many languages, translating, commissioning specific cultural history projects and so on "" all of which have to be integral aspects of any healthy, responsible and visionary attitude to arts promotion to help it mature. A collective approach to the festival could also lead to at least one major event being curated each year like a theme idea to highlight the riches of a form or a composer or a composition or a trend while, simultaneously, opening it out to fresh interpretations and energies.

It is inconceivable this annual festival can lead anywhere without addressing the larger totality of cultural decline affecting public spaces and infrastructures. It is not enough for corporate houses to be sponsoring 'art and culture'. They need to develop a genuine concern for the totality of the context. It was heartening to find R Srinivasan, of Redington India, pitching his energies "" and funds "" this year, towards installing Bose acoustic systems at the Music Academy Auditorium, in Chennai. It has made a 100 per cent difference to the sound quality at that venue. It is this kind of informed sponsorship that can bring about qualitative change "" not just blind sinking of money for nostalgic purposes.