After two successful editions, the Swara Mountain Arts Festival, initiated in 2022 by the Jagori Rural Charitable Trust and One Billion Rising, is back with its third edition slated to be held at Dharamshala from April 21.
The six-day Dharamshala festival will be a unique experience with a combination of workshops, time-in-nature meditations, performances, and local food, art and culture experiences. Through this event, Jagori, an organisation committed to the cause of building a just and equitable society following a path of non-violence and simplicity, aims to embed creativity through multiple art forms into its core work.
This year’s theme of the festival is ‘Rise for Freedom’.
The festival is a vision to create a space for artistic imagination, connection and uprising by bringing together artists and art enthusiasts to co-create a web of vibrations in different art forms.
“Swara, an amalgam of music and movement, exploration and expression, curiosity and creation, is a cosmic dance of the seven musical notes,” Abha Bhaiya, founder, Jagori Rural Charitable Trust, said.
This year the line-up includes multiple parallel workshops, an Open Gate event and performances by well-known artists. The workshop facilitators and artists will dip into spiritual exploration as the foundation of their work and performances.
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A sampler of things to come
The event will feature three parallel workshops facilitated by experts renowned in their fields of work. The following themes will be covered during these get-togethers:
- ‘The Pinch and The Ouch’ by Raj Zutshi
Actor Raj Zutshi will facilitate a four-day workshop themed ‘The Pinch and The Ouch’ which will take participants on a journey to discover for themselves, via the little nuggets of truth that make up the actor’s craft, and a peek into the actor’s mind. The participants will explore and enjoy the joys of storytelling and theatrical experience in the festival at Dharamshala.
- ‘Seeing With New Eyes, A Journey Into Deep Time’ by Gazala Leela Singh
A four-day immersion where participants can explore the question that each one of us must ask ourselves at some point in our lives: what do we value as precious? As a working premise, if we come from our ancestors and our children live in us through nature and nurture, we are the ancestors of the future. This recognition gives urgency and agency to our ticking time here on planet Earth to secure a liveable future for the sake of our children as the heat turns on climatically and in escalating polarisation and conflicts.
This immersion is based on a four-part spiral journey of The Work That Reconnects by ecological visionary and Buddhist scholar Joanna Macy and will be the primary technique and medicine to hold this question through contemplative and experiential group work including guided imagery, ritual, yoga, and song.
- ‘Flow to rise’ by Patanjali Bhati
This will see participants cultivating a relationship with their inner child. The workshop will be facilitated by Dharamshala-based painter, poet and writer Patanjali Bhati. It will involve activities such as outdoor painting sessions, sketching, yoga, meditations, discussions, and inspirational walks, and aims to provide a safe, nurturing and immersive environment.
The last day of the Dharamshala festival will centre around a public event at the Tibetan Institute of Performing Arts in McLeodGanj on April 26. It will feature acclaimed actor, singer and poet Piyush Mishra, Bharatnatyam dancer and yoga exponent Navtej Johar and Indian classical musicians Palash and Neeraj Dholakia, among others.
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Call for peace
The Swara Mountain Arts Festival is a call to rise for peace on the planet. It’s a call to all artists of peace to create a spiral of love, hope and harmony. To this end several popular and acclaimed artists and facilitators have been a part of this endeavour in the past, including dancers like Mallika Sarabhai and Aditi Mangaldas and filmmaker Shabnam Virmani, to name a few.
About the festival organisers
Jagori is a community-based organisation that has been working actively in Himachal Pradesh since 2002 on issues of adolescent and women’s empowerment, leadership building, health rights and entitlements, safety from violence against girls and women, organic agriculture, and various national and international campaigns.
It helps address discrimination on gender, caste, religion, disability, and sexual identities by spreading feminist consciousness, encouraging and strengthening the voices of women and girls and ensuring their right to life, dignity and safety. The organisation works with rural communities in nearly 300 villages in the Kangra, Chamba and Sirmaur districts of Himachal Pradesh.
One Billion Rising is a global campaign founded by V (formerly Eve Ensler) to end violence against girls, women, all marginalised communities and Earth. V is an acclaimed writer of many books and publications, (Vagina Monologue is one of them), a theatre artist and performer, an activist and public speaker.
The lead image at the top shows a performance of local artists at an earlier edition of the festival. (Photo courtesy Jagori Gramin)
