Welcome to Lost & Found
When I was about 10 years old, my family went through a very deep loss. We struggled for many years to make sense of this, to cope and to move on, and in the process I went quiet. For those who know me today, it seems impossible to believe that at a point in my life I had gone silent. My father was bewildered. So he decided to put me in a theatre workshop. At the end of that two month workshop I was transformed. I had found a voice, a way to tell my story and made new friends. As I dipped deeper into the world of theatre, my voice grew bolder and louder. I made this my life.
I am not the only one with a story like this. There are so many who have found solace in song, echoes in a film, reason in dance. There are many who embrace the arts through whatever means and channels available to them ... and I don't just mean artists. I mean people who are living, working, raising children. They chose the arts as doers, makers, watchers, listeners; on stage, off stage, in the foreground, in the wings.
Why then are the arts not everywhere, for everyone, and available at all times?
The arts are a tough business in this city. However well-made your play might be, however soulful your song, however meaningful and resonant your film, chances are that you will hit roadblocks very early on in the journey of taking your work to an audience.
Venues cost the earth and the moon to hire and ticket prices cannot begin to cover these expenses, so artists have few options but to struggle, toil and then throw up their hands or throw in the towel. How many theatre groups, promising musicians, dancers, dreamers have given up and turned towards careers in advertising or teaching or business, for the lack of an ecosystem that could have supported them? Too many. And we continue everyday, to lose this potential art - stories, songs, pictures - to the search for 'stability'.
Even those who grit their teeth, holding up an uncompromising 'never say die' attitude get tired over the years. Creativity begins to suffer under the odds of running from pillar to post to pay bills and burning the midnight oil to scrape through that one rehearsal for that precious show around the corner. The arts become a hobby, an indulgence, as yet another unpaid bill stares us in the face.
Why is this so hard? Because today we live in a time when the arts do not find support from the state, where culture is a neglected casualty in the union budget, and nepotism and bureaucracy swallow the precious little that is sent our way. Furthermore, the worth of culture is subjugated time and again to notions of 'markets' and 'commodity' that reduce the interaction between art and its audiences to numbers. Because anything must sell in order to have some worth. Why are there so few spaces that present the 'value' of art in the experience of art itself?
So we have made a decision, like several other artists in the city, to take matters into our own hands. In November 2014, we began to take the arts to where they belong - between people. We took theatre, music, dance, painting and crafts to community centres in Pitampura, Sarita Vihar and Vasant Kunj. We invited residents to soak in the joy of cultural and artistic exchange, to meet, to watch and to play, to mingle and engage with each other over tea. For fifteen days, we travelled across the city, setting up and striking down this neighbourhood festival.
And then we spent the following year and half trying to find our feet, make new plans and build a course ahead, seeking funds and resources that simply weren't available, and getting lost somewhere along the way.
This is just to say that we have not forgotten what we set out to do ... to make the arts thrive in every neighbourhood, to trigger imaginations and transform spaces into possibilities, to help invigorate and inspire the culture of this city we all call home.
Here we are. This is our voice. Found.
Welcome to Lost & Found.
Mallika Taneja
26th January'2016
New Delhi