Bhubaneswar: For the first time the art lovers of the capital city are going to be captivated by the stellar performances’ by several stalwarts and stars during the five-day long Shreshtha Bharat Sanskriti Samagam starting Tuesday.
The mega event is being hosted by the Kendra Sangeet Natak Akademi, India’s national academy for performing arts under the Ministry of Culture with support of the Odisha Government.
“Shreshtha Bharat Sanskriti Samagam is a specially designed series of festivals that would be staged across the country featuring many of the great performers and scholars from the field of music, dance, drama, folk and tribal arts, puppetry and allied traditions of India. Such series of congregations would hopefully make a big difference in strengthening and propagating the Akademi’s mission,” informed Akademi Deputy Secretary Raju Das, who is camping in the city for the festival.
The morning sessions, will be dedicated to seminars on various forms of arts including theater, music and dance every day at Bhanjakala Mandap. Eminent scholars, artistes and researchers from different parts of the country will take part in the seminars. The evening sessions will be followed by live performance at Rabindra Mandap.
The first day of the seminar would be devoted to music and the following days would focus on dance, drama, folk and tribal arts and would conclude with puppetry and allied traditions. The sessions would encourage interactions among the speakers, artistes and audience, Das explained.
Among the galaxy of eminent people who would be attending the five-day festival are Ramhari Das, Ajoy Chakrabarty, K Prabha Atre, Shruti Sadolikar Katkar, Vidyadhar Vyas, Sharad Sathe, Mysore Manjunath, Ritwik Sanyal, Yogesh Samsi in music; Sunil Kothari, Ratikant Mohapatra, Jatin Goswami, Gopal Prasad Dubey, Rajkumar Singhajit Singh, Purnima Pandey, Kanak Rele and Gita Chandran in dance; Anshuman Bhowmik, Ajit Dash, Atul Tiwari, Dulal Roy, Satish Alekar, Nisar Allana, Rudraprasad Sengupta, Devendraraj Ankur, Sachidanand Joshi and Samik Bandyopadhyay in theatre; SRD Prasad, Manmath Kumar Satapathy, , Mahadev Das Baul, Anil Saikia, Arjunsingh Shekhawat, Kaling Borang, VR Devika, DR Purohit and Prakash Khandge in folk tribal arts.
Among the stars who are going to enthrall the art connoisseurs at Rabindra Mandap during the festival are Rashid Khan, Rakesh Chaurasia, Shashank Subramaniam, TH Vikku Vinayakram and dancers Raja-Radha Reddy and Padma Subramanyam. Similarly, Satyabrat Rout and Moinul Haque would also present their theatre productions in the festival, it is learnt.
For the first time the festival is being organized at tier II cities instead of big cities. Starting from Bhubnaeswar in eastern India, the festival will travel to Vadodara in Western India, Chennai in South, Bhopal in Central, Amritsar in North and Guwahati in north-central India.
