The virtual JOMBA! Contemporary Dance Experience is around the corner and collaborations are underway to bring online viewers the best in local and international dance.
One dance company that will be a part of this year’s festival is the India-based The Pickle Factory Dance Foundation. The Calcutta-based dance organisation will showcase eight specially curated short dance performances on September 4.
The Pickle Factory make up the Indian Crossings Platform of the programme . These films express an evocative interpretation of the festival’s theme “border crossings”, and speak to the zeitgeist of contemporary Indian dance making and its relationship to film and screen.
Their programme titled “I m / Material” curated, especially for JOMBA! 2021 presents a series of dialogues between the mediums of dance and cinema created by artists from India.
The dancers and filmmakers negotiate various material and embodied spaces through movement, opening up tensions and textures between natural and man-made environments, elements and expectations. The relationships between the dancing body, the camera and the surrounding contexts are diverse, fluid, and complex – reflective of a country, like India, where socio-cultural borders are never static, and traditional and contemporary sensibilities often occupy the same time/space.
The work has been co-curated by founder and director of Pickle Factory Dance Foundation, Vikram Iyengar and filmmaker, Kunal Chakraborty. It also includes works and collaborations from Lubdhak Chatterjee, Dr Pompi Paul, Hediyeh Azma, Sumedha Bhattacharyya, Preethi Athreya, Sharan Devkar Shankar, Gia Singh Arora and Mukta Nagpal, Bimbavati Devi, Kankana Singh, Suman Sarkar, Souvik Banerjee, Thiyam Maurice, Niharika Senapati, Pippa Samaya, Nikita Maheshwary, Frédéric Lombard and Surjit Nongmeikapam.
The Pickle Factory films can be streamed for free on September 4 at 7pm here.
Get more information and the full programme here.