East meets West at Lewis festival
Purvai 2018 gets under way this August with a host of internationally acclaimed artists including Deepa Nair Rasiya, Gupreet Singh Notta, Kaviraj Singh Dhadyalla, Dalbir Singh Rattan and Kathak dancer Kanchan Maradan.
The festival, being held at An Lanntair, brings South Asian dance, music, writing, textiles and food to the Outer Hebrides in an eclectic arts festival, celebrating Scotland’s diversity of connections with India.
The headline event will be a ‘Summer Evening of Indian Raag’, taking place tomorrow (Friday August 17) and featuring one of the most highly acclaimed female Indian vocalists in the UK today, Deepa Nair Rasiya.
This year a new initiative for the festival, the Purvai Summer School – Yatra Òigridh – will be an opportunity for children aged eight to 13 years to experience a range of art forms including kathak dance, singing, drumming, puppet making and more.
This will lead to a multi-media performance on Saturday August 18 when children will take inspiration from the Yatra performance of last year’s festival and tell the story, through dance, music and puppetry, of the world-famous collector extraordinaire Colin Mackenzie who was born in Stornoway in 1754 and lived and travelled in India for most of his life, amassing the world’s largest collection of Indian art and artefacts.
The exhibition programme will include Cry Calcutta, by notable photographer Thomas Patrick Kiernan, and Document by Fòcas, which brings together three Scottish artists and three Indian artists in a stunning new collaborative show of photography.
Purvai 2018 will also bring a new literary event, New Passages, to An Lanntair on Tuesday August 21, which will celebrate and present new writing from collaborations between Scottish writers Nalini Paul and Abir Mukherjee, and Indian writers Sandip Roy and Sampurna Chattarji.
Alongside all this, the festival will offer local people and visitors the chance to take part in workshops in Indian drumming, yoga, Indian folk and Kathak dance and Indian kite and puppet making.
Deepa Nair Rasiya, Indian classical vocalist and headline act for Purvai 2018, said: ‘This will be my first visit to Stornoway and I am thrilled at the prospect of performing vocal Indian music at this year’s Purvai Festival.
‘I can already sense the magic and enchantment of the event and look forward to it with much anticipation.’
Catherine Maclean, Purvai curator at An Lanntair, said: ‘These new works and commissions are really what it is all about – opportunities for artists to collaborate across disciplines, cultures and genre to create ground-breaking new works that are relevant and representative of now.’