Bengaluru: In a celebration of languages through its amalgamation with art, the Indiranagar Club hosted the Language Festival 2018 (LF18) with a diverse range of eight languages - Kannada, Tamil, Hindi, Telugu, Urdu, Punjabi, Malayalam and English.
Tech start-up and writing app, ‘YourQuote’ curated the festival to promote a culture of creativity across languages and bring the Indian art community together under one umbrella breaking the barriers of regions and languages.
“We intended to bring together a balanced mix of artistes and performers across these vernacular languages. People are excited that there is so much choice and so much representation here,” said Jhelum Anikhindi, the festival Director.
The artistes ranged from the mainstream masters such as Piyush Mishra, stand-up comedian Rahul Subramanian, storyteller Mehak Mirza Prabhu from the YourQuote community as well as first time performers.
The festival that staged screening, poetry sessions, comedy and music performances also encompassed fascinating integration of Kashmiri and Urdu contemporary poetry with music through the Kashmiri band, ALIF and Bharatnatyam coming together with spoken word poetry in the programme titled, ‘See the word, hear the dance’.
Not just that, LF also showcased multiple panel discussions through both the days on subjects like ‘Hacking Digitisation of Content’, ‘Why do I write’ etc.
During a discussion about ‘Language in Indian Cinema: Evolution or Devolution?’ national award winning filmmaker and actor, Prakash Belwadi said, “The idea of appropriating everything in the world of literature is not so important when it comes to cinema. More than the language, it’s important that the words create an experience.”
While there was a session of ‘poetry in translation’ with renowned poets like Padmavati Rao, Mamta Sagar and others, who read poems in Tamil, Malayalam, Telugu, Hindi, Urdu and Kannada; there was another panel discussion, R(Evolution) with young spoken word poets talking about the growth of slam poetry.
Twenty-one-year-old Diksha Bijlani said, “Spoken world has evolved very positively, but it is also growing wide as a hobby more to be recorded for a Youtube sensation, which might not be so good.”
Spread across two days and three stages (Canvas, Expression, and Discovery) accommodating over 100 performances, the language festival proved to be a enriching retreat for the city's art lovers.
