Putting on a show… in a lockdown | India News

In the past two months, there have been any number of events from music concerts and festivals to webinars, talks, and even a dance conference to entertain an audience held captive in their homes. While virtual events will never be able to replace the ‘vibe’ of a live concert, watching them on Zoom, Facebook or Instagram Live is going to be a reality- for a while. Artistes and event organisers TOI spoke to for the story seemed to have taken this new development in their stride. “This (digital) format will gain more momentum in the future and more artists will choose this as an alternate form. But the traditional format will never die out as the live experience can never be matched,” says violin exponent Dr Jyotsna Srikanth who recently organised a 16-day digital world music festival called the International Music Premiere League (IMPL). medium75891963SHOOTING A SHORTFor Kannada actor Padmaja Rao it was the sheer drudgery of routine during the initial days of the lockdown that drove her to make 'Ondu Giftina Kathe', a short film that involved cast and crew from India, US and Canada. A 20-day project, Rao’s film has been on YouTube from April 25. “Sitting at home, it struck me that though we all were in a lockdown, it wasn’t entirely impossible to make a short film with people sitting outside India as well, so that’s what I did,” Rao says. The cast for the 30-minute-long film besides Rao includes music composer Praveen D Rao, Anirudh Mohan, and Sudha Belavadi among others. While writing the script was easy, making it was a whole new gamble. For one, every actor had to shoot their own scenes—and Rao had to trust that they’d get it right. “I had to explain the story and act out every role and send it to the actors. Then I had to send them specifications of how they had to shoot it on their smartphones,” she explains. medium75890740What’s probably endearing about the comedy short is that all the actors had their family members pitching in to shoot their scenes. Editing the short wasn’t easy either. “Because I couldn’t sit with the editor to oversee the work, there was a lot of back and forth between us on phone. He had a tough time putting it all together,” Rao says. LIVE MUSIC: STILL LOADING To organise a virtual event today, you need to on a minimum have a good smartphone, strong WiFi and uninterrupted power supply. When it’s an event that involves fewer people, things are more or less under control, but when you have to coordinate the performances of over 30+ musicians, Murphy’s Law applies.“Last Saturday, the power went off at one of the musician’s place and so for seven or eight minutes, there was a complete black out on her Instagram page as she waited for electricity to come back to perform,” recalls Bonny Fernandes, CEO and co-founder of Spark Magic Experiences. Fernandes and his business partner Mustafa Parvez are the brains behind Common Roots, a virtual music festival that is being held over four Saturdays this month, with each gig featuring 30 Indian and international musicians. medium75891667“We thought music was the best way to bring the community together and raise funds. But because most online concerts have a Bollywood slant, we decided to showcase multiple genres and a diverse range of musicians.” As someone who has been in the events industry for long, Fernandez admits that the new environment will take some getting used to. “In a live event, you have things under your control and a Plan B ready but here, you really don’t know what can go wrong. I mean, imagine having an international musician’s performance getting disrupted by a weak WiFi signal,” he laughs. Talking about IMPL, Srikanth says that coordinating the event that was held from April 25 to May 5 was managed between her (in Bengaluru) and collaborator, Carnatic musician KN Shashikiran (in Los Angeles). “We had close to 500 musicians take part including the likes of Pt Vishwa Mohan Bhatt, Ronu Majumdar, Sudha Raghunathan, Malladi Brothers among others. Three panel discussions featuring international musicians were held too.” About the technicalities she had to grapple with, Srikanth says, “We had to upload over 500 performance videos and that’s a handful of work. Because you have to make the viewing experience easy, exploring various platforms like Facebook and YouTube to Zoom, Skype, Webinar and Kine Master was an additional task.” REHEARSING AHEAD OF THE SHOWDancer Keerthi Kumar of Natya Stem Dance Kampni is thrilled that he and his team managed to pull off the two-day Dr Maya Rao Kathak & Choreography Conference ‘without any glitches’. Held as a digital conference, the event featured speakers including Anita Ratnam, Rajiv Menon, Aditi Mangaldas and Mahesh Dattani. “Once we had the initial idea in place, we had to work out everything from the softwares to use to the ambience we wanted to create in terms of the backgrounds, sets and lighting,” Kumar says. Ramya Nagaraj, artistic director of the dance school adds, “We prepared the speakers in advance. We gave them guidelines about how to set up their cameras, we even held rehearsals for them to test the audio and video quality.” Commenting on the future of performances, Madhu Natraj, founder of the conference, says, “Performing in front of a camera makes one feel like you are dancing in a cocoon, which is why most performers are looking at this ‘virtual platform’ only as a stop-gap arrangement.”Untitled Carousel 75691945