Fest gets real with Tales of War & Peace
CONCERTS: Indian Summer Festival director sees today’s troubled times as fertile ground for musical explorations
War and peace — there is no shortage of distance between the two, and much to learn about each. In choosing “Tales of War & Peace” as the theme for this year’s 2017 Indian Summer Festival, co-founder and artistic director Sirish Rao felt he was reflecting reality.
“We went to themes a few years back, and if you look around the world right now it seems a time of a lot of frictions, suspicions and divisions presenting as pressing issues,” said Rao.
“For us, art isn’t just something you celebrate in the good times but something that addresses the issues around us. It should both chronicle and protest the state of war but also celebrate and hold dear the state of peace.”
Rao had considerable experience with literary festivals in India, and brought that expertise to develop a strong literary component in Indian Summer. This year, in association with the Vancouver Writer’s Fest, the festival presents Man Booker Prize-winning author Arundhati Roy to launch her latest tome The Ministry of Utmost Happiness (June 26, 7 p.m. at St. Andrew’s Wesley United Church).
Since its founding in 2010, the 10-day festival has presented a lineup of artists unlike any other. Taking its “where worlds meet” mandate seriously, the variety of presenting artists involves an international cast. There is everything from Graphically Speaking, an evening with Vice contributing editor and visual artist Molly Crabapple, globally lauded graphic novelist Joe Sacco and Bangalore/New Delhi-based journalist and author Raghu Karnad discussing the role of the artist in turbulent times (July 14, 8 p.m., SFU Woodward’s Goldcorp Centre for the Arts), to I See The Promised Land, a performance based on the life of Dr. Martin Luther King by literary bluesman Arthur Flowers (July 14, 6 p.m., SFU Goldcorp Centre for the Arts).
Indian Summer also appears to eye Vancouver with more than just a South Asian lens.
“Again — even more so this year than others — this is less and less a time to think about national borders or specific identities and to realize that we need solidarity to keep this world going,” Rao said.
“With someone like Arthur Flowers, is it an unusual choice to present at a South Asian-focused festival when you consider how much Dr. King was himself influenced by Gandhi and the whole non-violent movement? Plus, he has worked with a painter from India on a graphic novel, so there are always all these relationships in a global world.”
This cross-cultural collaboration on art and ideas has been going on as long as humankind has been in motion, but Rao thinks events such as Indian Summer can exhibit the vital importance of pan-global arts at a time when the dominant thinking in many nations appears to run counter to that idea.
“These collaborations are happening, have been happening, on a global scale and reflect the world we live in every day,” he said. “It’s time we get back to a globalization that is something more than just market forces and trade, to one that reflects creative solidarity.”
As a primary example of this, Indian Summer is presenting two multiple award-winning musicians who have taken this spirit of global collaborating to the highest level over the past few decades.
Dr. L. Subramaniam is a master of the Carnatic (South Indian classical) violin who has composed for New York Philharmonic, London Symphony Orchestra and Berlin Opera, and worked with Yehudi Menuhin and Stevie Wonder. He teams up with tenor saxophonist Ernie Watts, who has performed on over 500 recordings with Thelonious Monk, Frank Zappa and many others, in Here Is Where We Meet (July 8, 8 p.m., The Orpheum).
“L. Subramaniam is one of that breed of Indian musicians who came out at the same time that The Beatles went to India and musicians such as Ravi Shankar arose,” said Rao. “Since then, he has played a role in creating a fusion that isn’t some kind of forced, messy middle ground, but rather something that shows all the musicians playing to their highest levels. Ernie Watts is one of the last of the great giants from that Monk-Gillespie-Coltrane era.”
Music, literary arts, and comparative guided tours and lectures of the Punjabi and Chinatown market areas are all included in the stimulating roster of events at this year’s festival, but of special note is the late booking of Talvin Singh.
One of the progenitors of the U.K.’s Asian Underground movement in the late ‘80s, DJ/ producer/tabla player Singh was key in shaping what has now become the standard of contemporary global EDM. Mashing up everything from funk and hip-hop with Arabic scales, Indian instrumentation and more, his work remains vital.
Singh will have electronic music fans pumped up at the closing gala Constellations event (July 15, 7:30 p.m.,The Vogue)