বাংলা - Kala Mela - 2015From 17 January to 14 March 2015

Santiniketan, India

I edition

Theater, Art, Ritual and Anthropology

A series of workshop, performances, meetings guided by: Jairo Cuesta (Colombia),

Agnieszka Korytkowska (Poland), Nicolas Nuñez Alvarez (Mexico) and

Deepan Sivaraman (India)

Artistic Directors: Eleonora Caturegli and Claudia Roselli

Kala Mela (in Bengali language বাংলা, Meeting of Arts) aims to build new bridges in the map of human creative inner worlds.The event allows the participants to be free from habits and more open to welcome far away cultures and innovative research field. Masters and theater directors from India, Colombia, Mexico and Poland will work with participants to train body and perceptions: to listen and to see in other directions out of the ordinary, to create and to act. The workshops aim to open channels of human resources, to preserve knowledge and memory of rituals and to reflect on the contemporary international tendencies of art and theater. Kala Mela bring together Theater, Art, Ritual and Anthropology, imagining for its participants new systems of learning and new way of creation.Kala Mela insert itself into the horizon of awareness of one's own spiritual geography and into the important celebration of the twenty-five years of activity of Theater House.Its development gently leads to India, traveling through Mexico, Colombia and Poland. The festival imagines, for its participants, to expand secret inner landscapes and to open new creative visions. The theater, its power and its enchantment will grow during Kala Mela, allowing itself to dialogue with art, ritual and anthropology.

Eleonora Caturegli and Claudia Roselli promoted the I edition of "Kala Mela. Theater, Art, Ritual and Anthropology".The event will take place at Santiniketan, West Bengal (India) in the beautiful natural surroundings of Theater House, founded by Abani Biswas on 1990.Meetings and conferences will be held in partnership with the Visva Bharathi University, one of the more prestigious and well known University of India, founded by the Nobel Prize, Rabindanath Tagore.

The international team of guests is composed by: Jairo Cuesta (Colombia), Agnieszka Korytkowska (Poland), Nicolas Nuñez Alvarez (Mexico) and Deepan Sivaraman (India).

They will lead the following workshops:

- Surrender, Jairo Cuesta, 17-31 January 2015

- Women: when I dance I pray twice, Agnieszka Korytkowska, 1-14 February 2015

- Theater as a personal rite, Nicolas Nuñez Alvarez, 17 February-1 March 2015 - Exploring the language of theater of scenography, Deepan Sivaraman, 3-14 March 2015

WORKSHOPS

SurrenderJairo Cuesta

17-31 January 2015

Description:When the great ninth-century Chinese Zen master, Yun-Men, was asked “How it is whenthe tree withers and its leaves fall? How it is when you are empty-handed and naked, when you have nothing to hold onto, when everything you relied upon falls away?”The master answered: “Whole body exposed in the golden wind.” This is surrender.When we perform a task for a result, we are never totally in the action. We must be like the child who disappears in play. “To… dive into the craft of acting or playing… to forget mind, forget body, forget why we are doing it and who is there, is the essence of craft” (Nachmanovitch, Free Play, 146) and the essence of New World Performance Lab’s (NWPL) work in Performance Ecology.Surrender is a workshop in disarming and disappearing, the unexpected and the flow, riskand the art of the present.Performance Ecology: is Jairo Cuesta’s term for a line of research he has conducted sinceworking in Jerzy Grotowski’s Theatre of Sources.He traces the word ecology to its Greek root oikos, meaning “house,” and relatesPerformance Ecology to humanity’s increasing alienation from the “first house”, the bodyin the natural environment.The residential work sessions in Performance Ecology are designed around the rudimentary performative elements concerning one’s humanness and relationship with the physicalworld. As we enter the post-human age of high technology, Jairo Cuesta and James Slowiakhave organized various aspects of their respective research into a flow of detailed exercises (individual and collective), songs, dances, texts, and creative work that serve to reclaim our vital forces and capacity for contact.New World Performance Lab members lead participants through the intensive program (which usually lasts from three days to ten days) in an attempt to rediscover the urge to act. As the participant struggles to remember, to reveal, to accomplish or to create, he/she fights for mastery of the body and voice, vitality and purpose.Participants express themselves in patterns of voice and movement whose tension, composition and energy uncover a unique and untamed power and precision.Performance Ecology seeks to liberate the dormant energy and creative impulses in the participant/performer in solitude or in company, with the space or with the partner.Performance Ecology involves creative training in the basic elements of the actor’s craft: physical exercises, voice work, attention and perception, precision and flow, seeing, listening, meeting and the montage of physical actions.The work with songs from the Shaker culture and other traditions, exercises in coordination,individual actions, structured improvisation, dramaturgy, montage, and the acting tools culminates in a Rendering that provides the opportunity for each participant to engage in the dynamics of performance.Performance Ecology is more than a workshop; it is a performance event that encourages the task of creating active culture.Cuesta and Slowiak have constructed a structural tool that builds community and compassion while exploring the participant’s individuality, creativity and cultural dignity.

Duration:From 17 to 31 January, 14 Days of work. During the workshop it will be a day free.

Time of work:Six sessions of different durations every day. Beginning earlier in the morning and finishing late night.

Participants must bring:Work clothes: short pants for the physical training, comfortable clothes for the training in the forest. For the vocal work: for woman comfortable clothes and long skirts for man: pants not jeans and man shirt, not t-shirt. Running shoes for run inside the forest.

Number of places:The maximum amount of people that can participate is 20 persons.Reservation is mandatory.

Cost: 500 Euro

When I dance, I pray twice.Agnieszka Korytkowska

1-14 February 2015

Description:The essence of the workshop is to create a new theatre language that will talk about womenand their community in the fight against oppression, violence and socio-cultural injustices.Aim of the seminar will be to mix tradition with modernity, combining elements of European and Hindu theatre. The research will deepen the universal language of theater, which expresses the inexpressible: the painful experiences of women and their solidarity in duration and fight. The following topics will be divided into a drama, improvisational acting, movement and dance.

Research points:- Women, their realities along the historical changes: advantages and disadvantages.- Feminism and Freedom.- Crossing the boundaries of fear, build confidence. (I'm in the space surrounding me, among the people: woman among other women, woman among men)- Women patterns: in mythology, in film industry, in pop-culture, in social media, in Occidental feminism- Living in the shadow of men: validity, value and reinterpretation of this sentence- Global injustice against women- What could happen if men have to live without women? - Stereotypes in motion about man and woman

Practical exercises:- Me and my mind. My physical body.- Movement meaningless and registered movement. Movement as sign.- What is the gesture? What is the dance? What is meant by facial expressions?- Improvisation, what it is and why it is considered to be obligatory during work on the show.- What is the sign in the theater then the combination, abbreviation, counterpoint?- What are the factors of everyday life inspiring the work? Searching for meanings and the translation of these meanings into motion in the scene.- Creating your own world and placing yourself in the universe.- Partnering and sensing partner.- Building your own energy, with a partner and work on energy in the team.- Personal code of movement.- Dance as the way of freedom. "When I dance, I pray twice"- I want destroy what fear is given to my way of moving.- Understanding the kind of communication of my body. Literal or abstract communicator?

Final performance:From all these points comes up a new body language, which in addition to the word, set design and costume will be the draft of the idea to express the characters in a final performance.A final performance, will be created by the director, that will guide artists in a common work together with a Polish dramaturge and a choreographer present for all the duration of the workshop. The main issue will be searching theatrical language of women narrative.

Duration: 14 days

Time of work:Morning session: from 9.00 to 13.00Afternoon session: from 16.00 to 20.00

Number of person: The maximum amount of people that can participate is 20 persons.Reservation is mandatory.

Cost: 500 Euro

Theater as a personal rite.Nicolas Nuñez Alvarez

17 February-1 March 2015

Description:The seminar following the indications of the director will be developed in theoretical and practical way. The work proposed from Nicolas Nuñez Alvarez will introduce participants to rite’s basic tools.Nicolas Nuñez Alvarez would like discuss and experience the role of rite within the context of contemporary theater, together with the participants.One of the aims of the entire workshop is the better understanding of the theater’s primordial role in society. The principal aim is to become familiarized with performance research methodology, and to discover the means to activate the vitality contained in theater’s sacred origins: the rite.Nuñez will work - mainly - with two ritual/theatrical sources: the pre-Hispanic and the Western one. Within the pre-Hispanic context, he tries to understand how some dynamics from ancient Náhuatl theater can be used today as splendid tools for the contemporary actor’s training. This field will be explored theoretically and practically.Within the western context, we will work via ‘participatory theater’ with the origins of the Eleusian myths and its possible actualization.The exercise will be focused on: Know yourself - Control yourself - You can because you think that you can. Also in this part the work will be done theoretically and practically.On the workshop will be also analyzed the succeeding models of ancient rituality:- Olmeca (Energetic Pre-Hispanic postures)- Hu-ra-kan (Heaven’s Heart)- Quetzalcóatl (The Feathered Serpent)- Citlalmina (Mexican-Tibetan sacred dance, authorized by Generala Teresa, from the Mesa del Santo Niño de Atocha – México and, on the Tibetan side, by His Holiness, the XIV Dalai Lama).Practically will be also experimented, exercises based on different approaches to the ritual/theatrical structure:- Dynamics of rite- Field work regarding the rite within the personal body: theatre as a personal rite

If the climate conditions allow the director would like guide a ‘nictémero’ (exercise of sensitization and attention from sunset to sunrise).

Duration: 13 days

Time of work, daily program:Morning session: from 10:30 a.m. to 12:30 p.m.A psychophysic dynamic: from 1:00 p.m. to 2:00 p.m.Lunch breakTheory and feedback: from 4:00 p.m. to 5:00 p.m.Sensibilization session: from 5:30 p.m. to 7:30 p.m.

For those interested in this seminar, it is recommend to read:‘Teatro Antropocósmico’ by Nicolas Núñez published in Spanish by Arbol Editorial,México, 1991 (in Spanish)‘Anthropocosmic Theater’ by Nicolas Núñez published by Harwood Academic Publishers,London, 1996 (in English)

Other recommended bibliography:The Origin of Religions, Mircea EliadeSacred and Profane, Mircea EliadeThe Hero of a Thousand Masks, Joseph CampbellThe Origins of Tragedy, F. NietzscheThe Shock of the Future, A. Toffler

Number of places: The maximum amount of people that can participate is 20 persons.Reservation is mandatory.

Cost: 500 Euro

Exploring the language of theatre of scenographyDeepan Sivaraman3-14 March 2015

Description:The aim of this workshop is to encourage the participants to develop a dramaturgy through scenography challenging the supremacy of word in theater making process. Participants will be introduced various ways of devising a piece of theater including space and object dramaturgy. They will be taking through a series of physical and psychological theater exercises, site specific actions, engaging with objects and puppets in the process of developing a performance text (aural & visual). There will be introductory lectures on the history of theater of scenography screening the videos of many avant-gardists including the works of Tadeusz Kantor and Romeo Castellucci as starting point. Outcome of this workshop could be a theater performance of 20 to 30 minutes.Subject content of the performance expecting to be evolved through the process.

Duration: 11 days

Maximum participants: 20 persons. Reservation is mandatory.

Date: 3-14th March

Time of work: From 9.00 a.m. to 1.30 p.m. From 3.00 p.m. to 5.30 p.m.

Cost: 500 Euro

General Info:

Reservation is mandatory.It is necessary to send an E-mail with curriculum vitae and declaration of interest at:kalamela2015@gmail.com

For any information is possible to call: +393485190095, +393396867996Or simply write to: kalamela2015@gmail.com

The four seminars proposed by Kala Mela, are addressed to theater professionals,performers, student and researchers from all the world and to all the persons seriouslyinterested in getting a practical experience of some of the most innovative and complex artistic researches that marked the field of culture in the XXI century.

The workshop will be located at:

“Theatre House”Khele Danga, Sriniketan Post731236 Birbhum, Santiniketan/BolpurWest Bengal, India

Cost:The prices of the workshop are inclusive of accommodation and meals. If some person is interested to participate to more than one workshop, the price will be reduced proportionally. More workshop, minor expense.

- 1 workshop: 500 Euro- 2 workshops: 900 Euro- 3 workshops: 1200 Euro- 4 workshops: 1600 Euro

A percentage of free seats for Indian participants, with a scholarship will be provided.Information will be furnished on request.

Payment:For the payment the necessary bank coordinates, for a bank transfer, will be communicated directly to each individual person interested to participate.

Practical Information:The entire travel to India and the air tickets are under the individual economic responsibility of every single participant.The arrival in Theater House must be, at any time, the day before the beginning of the workshop.The nearest Airport is Subhas Bose Airport in Kolkata.If necessary, someone from Theater House can come to pick up the participant from Kolkata to Theater House in Santiniketan.From Kolkata to Santiniketan is possible to go by train and by taxi.

By Train: From Howrah railway station in Kolkata it is necessary to take a train to Bolpur station. ( the nearest station to Santiniketan )By Taxi: A taxi from Kolkata airport or train station, can be used for coming directly to the address of Theater House.The costs of any kind of transportation from Kolkata to Santiniketan are also borne by the participants.

For the foreign participants it is necessary a VISA to enter in India.More detailed information in the website of Indian Embassy.

Some medical vaccinations are recommended, but not mandatory, connected with the individual choices of travel of each participant.

Additional Information:No any previous knowledge is requested but it’s very important to be respectful inside the training room and entirely dedicated to the work.An educated behavior due to the common life is also highly requested.The daily schedule and the rhythm of work are intensive, a daily practice will be maintained during each work session.

Supporters of the entire event: