The Summer series of Mid-day Mantra
Three Saturdays of chat and performance screenings from established and renowned artists, as well as emerging artists, as they discuss dance from their perspectives as choreographers, performers, producers, students, teachers and mentors.
Mid-day Mantras have, over the years presented exceptional live music events to audiences in Birmingham. Presently we are able to offer you these concert events, music and sometimes dance, online wherever you are.
Join us at facebook.com/sampad.arts on Saturdays 26 June, 3 July and 10 July. Currently, Mid-day Mantra’s are FREE online events.
Line up:
Saturday 26 June, 12noon (BST) Urja Thakore presents – Parbati Chaudhury and Shyam Dattani featuring performances by Parbati and Shyam alongside a performance by Meera Patel choreographed by Parbati
Saturday 3 July, 12noon (BST) Kali Chandrasegaram presents – Geetha Shankaran Lam and Hari Krishnan: Dancing in our Fabulous Forties and Fifties!
Saturday 10 July, 12noon (BST) Mira Balchandran Gokul presents – Yuva Gati dancers Shaayiini Ravichantren, Soumya Saladi and Shriya Aaytee
Saturday 3 July, 12noon (BST): Dancing in our Fabulous Forties and Fifties! Kali Chandrasegaram presents – Geetha Shankaran Lam and Hari Krishnan
Kali Chandrasegaram is a multi-disciplined, experimental dancer and choreographer, working across many genres from Indian classical to contemporary. I believe in dance as a personal journey of the soul for self and communal awareness. Originally from Malaysia where diversity is ingrained, integrating differences is in my veins. I have been an artist in the UK Contemporary South Asian dance scene and have worked for many of the genre’s leading companies and organisations for over 20 years, teaching dance workshops in schools and for all ages and abilities. Worked in communities of different ethnic origins, in libraries of little towns, for older people in care homes, dance and disability, dance and dementia and dance for refugees. Performing nationally and internationally from the proscenium to in a flowing river, dancing without boundaries. In the lockdown I have ventured into creating dance and editing dance videos for the digital stage.
Geetha Shankaran Lam is the Artistic Director of Geethashankarandance, and a dancer from Kuala Lumpar. She first studied Bharatanatyam from Guru Krishna Kumari of the renowned Kalakshetra Dance Academy before being hand-picked to study Odissi by Padmashri Guru Ramli Ibrahim in 1985, and soon Geetha was chosen to perform with Ramli Ibrahim and formed the group that became known as Sutra Dance Theatre. In 2004, Geetha was awarded the Guru Deba Prasad Seva Award and in 2020 awarded the Lifetime Achievement Award by the Indian High Commissioner to Malaysia for her continuous efforts to Odissi Dance.
Hari Krishnan is a dancer, choreographer, scholar, and educator who specializes in Bharatanatyam and post-colonial, queer dance and film studies in addition to contemporary dance from global perspectives. Artistic director of Toronto-based company, inDANCE, he’s also Chair and Professor at Wesleyan University’s Department of Dance in Connecticut. His monograph, Celluloid Classicism: Early Tamil Cinema and the Making of Modern Bharatanatyam (Wesleyan University Press, 2019) won a special citation from the 2020 de la Torre Bueno© First Book Award Committee of the Dance Studies Association. The book has been hailed as “an invaluable addition to the scholarship on Bharatanatyam.”
Photo by Sally Cohn