The International Dance and Music Festival this year focussed on the growing popularity of Indian music among foreign nationals. Anwar Haleem, Deputy Director General of ICCR, chatted with I Kaur
What if you were introduced to the beats of tabla and the strings of sitar by somebody who is not an Indian, but actually FrenchIJ What if traditional flautists were brought in from Mexico, Kathak dancers from China, Odissi dancers from Malaysia and Bharatanatyam professionals from Russia or KazakhstanIJ You would probably feel like you are attending a cultural festival in some other country. But at The International Dance and Music Festival this is a common sight.
While Western influences entered the culture sphere of our country, disrupting our deep-rooted tradition, we worked in tangent and began spreading our culture world over. The fourth International Music and Dance Festival recently organised by the Indian Council for Cultural Relations holds testimony to that. Spread over two days, the festival featured performances by six foreign artistes who are professionals in Indian classical dance and music.
Deputy Director General of ICCR Anwar Haleem feels that the festival was an amalgamation of culture. He shared, “One of our major mandates was to promote classical and semi-classical dance and music in the world. While doing so, we found that in several countries all over the world, India had strongly established itself. Foreign nationals had taken up our traditional dance and music forms for professional training. So, we decided to have a festival that can showcase the talent of these international artists while showing the strong integration of our culture.”
Haleem added that a lot of these international artistes had opened up their own training centres in their respective countries.
“Most of these performers learnt under our scholarship programme and liked it so much that they achieved expertise in it. Then they felt that our culture was strong and valuable and must be spread further. So they opened their own institutes and started teaching,” he said.
The previous three editions of this festival were only based on dance. This was the first time that music was introduced to it.
The participating artistes in dance and music were Akmaral Kainazarova, lyazzat Polatbek and Rada Olmessekova from Kazakhstan, Sylvie Hiely and laurent Gherzi were the sitar-tabla duo from France, Sumathi Chandra, Nritta Ganeshi Manoharan and Shangita Manoharan from Malaysia, Maria Zhiltsova and Zoya Smirnova from Russia, Nathalie Ramírez from Mexico and Zhang Xiaoqing from China.
According to Haleem, the highlight of the event was the flute recital by Nathalie from Mexico.
“The flute is a very difficult instrument. Not many people have expertise in. This was the first time a flautist from abroad came and performed here,” he shared.
This initiative by the ICCR was not only limited to the capital city, said Haleem.
“We have taken all the groups to different cities in India. We wanted to percolate this event all over the country. We have taken it to cities like Jaipur and Bhopal. I think it is the best way to showcase the penetration of the Indian culture in the world,” he concluded.