At the Still Point

Kolkata and Bengaluru-based organisation Artsforward curates and produces At the Still Point, a crowd-funded Indian contemporary dance platform, launched in 2017. The festival spotlights “artists whose work is edgy, dynamic and extraordinary in the way it contributes to current social and political discourse”. An “intervention into the artist-audience relationship, it seeks to make the community a stakeholder in the nurturing of dancers and their practice”.

Past editions of the festival have been themed around acts such as Mandeep Raikhy’s Queen Size in 2017, Body Sense inspired by Diya Naidu’s Rorschach Touch and and Avantika Bahl’s Say, What? in 2018, Strange Times inspired by Diya Naidu’s Strange Intimacies and Satakshi Nandy’s Strange Fruit in 2019, Amorphous by Ronita Mookerji and documentarian Priyanshi Vasani and Atho Hidimba Katha by the Samuho Collective in 2020 and Detritus in 2022. Conceptualised by Artsforward director Paramita Saha and choreographed by Prashant More and Surjit Nongmeikapam, with music by composer Karshni Nair and featuring dancers Amitabh Srivastava, Madhyama Halder, Pintu Das, Sangram Mukhopadhyay, Srestha Das Choudhury and Ujjayee Banerjee, Detritus bore the tagline ‘We are what we throw away’. The performance used the body to “comment on waste, remnants of refuse, and our collective impact on the environment”. It was staged at art gallery Experimenter’s Hindustan Road premises.

Check out more dance festivals here.