Folk artists find their beat online

CHENNAI: Since the coronavirus outbreak,

folk artists Magizhini

and Manimaran have performed 45 songs celebrating village traditions and touching upon themes like love, resilience and unity. The months of March, April and May, eaten up by the pandemic and the

nationwide lockdown

, also happen to be the harvest season that ushers in weddings, social events and temple festivals — the time when folk artists earn their remuneration for the year.

But as this year of cancelled shows, financial crisis and healthcare emergencies delivers a devastating blow to folk artists, a growing number of them are rising to the challenge by upgrading themselves in a way they never thought they would — by going digital.

Sensing the resignation that had taken over artist communities, Manimaran and Magizhini — faced with cancelled tours and financial crunch themselves — decided they would use their social media handles to keep spirits up with songs that reminded musicians and the public that it was art that thrived through the worst of times.

"We have shown this every time we were hit by crisis. After Cyclone Gaja, we went to the worst-hit communities to perform for them. These times are no different — except that we are reaching out through Facebook," says Magizhini. The duo is organising an online global parai festival and has put out an open call for people to send in performance clips that will be shortlisted and awarded on July 20.

"Parai is a movement, not just an art form. We want to see to it that the art and its practitioners don’t lose grip during these times," says Manimaran, who, along with his son, has been holding free parai classes for people across the world since the lockdown.

Chennai’s Sumanasa Foundation, of which musician

T M Krishna is one of the trustees, will be extending support to the parai competition, and has been at the forefront of providing financial support to marginalised performance artists affected during Covid. It has raised `46 lakh under the Covid fund so far. The latest initiative is an Online Performing Arts Festival (ending today), showcasing traditions that fall outside the digital economy under which they’ve raised a little more than `6 lakh. Its unique model is aimed at creating an ecosystem wherein these art traditions are appreciated and paid for, and therefore opens the festival to anyone who can make a donation of their choice on the crowdfunding campaign on Milaap.

This was the first time that B Muthuchandran, a sixth-generation practitioner of

Tholpavai Kuthu

(a form of shadow puppetry) — and among the 25 artists who are part of the festival — performed to a cell phone camera instead of a bustling crowd. "Tholpavai Kuthu is looked at as an entertainment, so it is a crowd of at least 1,000 people, their reactions and applause that I have shown to. Still, it was heartening to see people from different parts of the world watching me perform online. It gave me a new kind of high," says Muthuchandran, who recorded and sent the video from his village of Thirumalaipuram in

Kanyakumari

.

While Covid’s sudden and severe economic implication on the country’s marginalised, traditional, occupational and nomadic artists has pushed them to explore the digital space, the transition has been nothing but easy, says Radhika Ganesh of Ek Potlee Ret Ki, an activist collective. Since the lockdown, Ek Potlee Ret Ki and Young People for Politics have engaged artists including a traditional puppeteer and Chakri dancers of Rajasthan, to give online workshops and performances to netizens in cities, but realised soon enough that they were competing with a deluge of high budget curated content and masterclasses that had also taken over social media during this time.

"For most folk arts, traditional patronage is steeped in feudal practice. We wanted to dismantle this system and build a new generation of patrons in the digital space, but realised there is little awareness among the younger generation on how valuable and deep our own local cultures are and why they should spend on it," says Radhika, who had to make many of the workshops free.

"The challenge has also been to equip these rural communities with the money and skill set needed to use the digital medium. For many, the money spent on data to livestream a two-hour video of a workshop can sustain the household for a month. We learned these things along the way, raised funds to give mobile recharges and are working to create a network of young people across villages to explore and find their own identity in the digital network. This is the way change will happen and sustain in the years to come."