The Serendipity Arts Festival in Goa has grown in stature since its inception, placing more burden on the organisers to ensure that the organistaion is flawless.
Keeping this in mind, the organisers have started the groundwork for holding the festival in December 2023, even though there are still eight long months to go.
The organisers have announced the curators for the nine-day festival which will be held from the December 15 to 23, 2023, its sixth edition.
This time, the festival is getting ready to celebrate the arts of the South Asian region with a diverse line-up of interdisciplinary projects and initiatives conceptualised by a panel of distinguished curators spanning across the fields of performing, visual, culinary arts and craft.
The festival is being held in partnership with the Entertainment Society of Goa laying emphasis on the relationship between culture and the city.
According to a press release issued here, Sandeep Kumar Sangaru and Anjana Somany will be curating the section on craft to showcase varied crafts that blend traditional and contemporary practices.
Quasar Thakore Padamsee, who curated last year’s theatre section of the festival, is back to helm the theatre segment of the festival that will showcase an eclectic selection of plays.
Everybody’s favourite, food, is closely linked with festivities and is an indispensable element of the festival. For this edition, Chef Thomas Zacharias and The Locavore Team will curate the important culinary quotient of Serendipity Arts Festival through a gastronomical journey that ties people and cultures.
Bickram Ghosh, who has curated the previous edition of the festival, along with Ricky Kej, will curate the musical section with a wide range of concerts covering diverse genres and addressing various social-cultural ideas and topics.
Geeta Chandran and Mayuri Upadhya will put together classical, experimental and contemporary dance performances and workshops. Visual Arts curators for this edition are Veeranganakumari Solanki and Vidya Shivdas.
Spread across multiple venues in Panjim and around Goa, the festival will continue to promote innovation and experimentation within the arts, adhering to its core values of sustainability, inclusivity, and accessibility.
The festival will continue to be a celebration of community with region-specific projects, as well as workshops for people with special needs and dedicated segment for children’s programmes.
Speaking about the festival, its role in facilitating cultural collaborations and welcoming the curators Mr Sunil Kant Munjal, Founder & Patron, Serendipity Arts and Founder of THE BRIJ, said, “South Asia’s unparalleled cultural richness has been shaped by multiple influences over the centuries because of its uniqueness."
We are lining up top-notch curators and collaborators for the festival this December as part of our journey to capture South Asia’s richness and diversity, and blend these with the best global art practices, he said.
"While looking at multiple art forms, we also investigate and present the inter-disciplinarity of the many art forms, broadly through visual, performing, culinary and performance arts,” he added.
Adding further, Munjal said, “This festival has emerged as a seamless platform that promotes artistic expressions and supports the creative economy of the entire region through collaboration, experimentation, innovation, grants, arts residencies, and representation."
"The platform is unique because of the sheer size and quality of the opportunity it presents. SAF allows artists and audiences to engage through the arts, it fosters multiple cultural exchanges, it allows artistic experiences to develop, it brings the world to India, and most certainly presents India to the world,’’ he observed.
The 6th edition (in its phyical form) of the festival will also feature a set of special curators including Zubin Balaporia (music), Vikram Iyanger (dance), Elizabeth Yorke and Anusha Murthy with Edible Issues, who will be the special curators for culinary arts.
Bhagyashree Patwardhan will return to curate a project around local Goan design practices. There might be additions to the list of special curators, closer to the festival, according to the organisers.
Smriti Rajgarhia, Director, Serendipity Arts Foundation and Festival, said, “We are happy to announce our new line-up of curators who will help us in re-imagining the arts and creating an array of projects that are engaging, inclusive and immersive.”
The festival is an amalgamation of creative collaborations with cultural institutions and cultural departments of foreign embassies. In addition to Institut Français (India), Pro Helvetia, and the British Council as project partners, the festival is expecting to showcase more projects brought in collaboration with other cultural institutions.
The festival promises to explore innovation and experimentation and facilitate global creative collaborations to increase public engagement with arts.