For a residential workshop over six days that will enable an exchange of knowledge and experiences between shadow puppeteers representing six traditional puppetry forms and contemporary projective shadow theatre practitioners. The artists will collaboratively explore contemporary approaches to conceptualising, devising and performing shadow puppetry through an in-depth inquiry into the narratives, aesthetics, techniques, and social contexts of puppetry. The Grantee’s deliverables to IFA along with the final report will be still and video documentation from the workshop and notes from the session on reflection and evaluation. Grant funds will pay for professional fees, venue hire, travel and living costs, honorarium, local conveyance, material costs, equipment hire, stationery and an accountant’s fee.
For the creation of an experimental video art piece to be included in an installation. Drawing from experiences of women from Kerala in the nuptial chamber, the video will try to address the psychic significance of the ‘wedding night’ in their lives. It will push the boundaries between the academic and artistic realms of cinema, art and psychology. The outcome will be a 15-to-20-minute experimental video. The deliverables to IFA with the Final Report will be the video, rush footage, production stills, art works, interviews generated as part of the project and media reports. Grant funds will pay for costs towards an honorarium, professional fees, hire of studio and equipment, travel, materials and publicity, refreshments, and an accountant’s fee.
For research on the British Colonial visual narratives of landscape and people in the High Ranges of Kerala. The project will study how European photographers, ethnographers and travellers documented the daily lives of people in the region and critique the colonial gaze. It will examine the ways in which the binaries of the civilised and the uncivilised were created on the basis of physical representations of the native people staged against exotic backdrops. The outcome of this project will be a photo essay and an exhibition. The Grantee’s deliverables to IFA with the final reports will be the essay and photographic documentation from various collections across Kerala. Grant funds will pay for travel and living costs, documentation costs, DTP and printing costs, exhibition costs, reference material costs, and an accountant’s fee.
For the creation of an an interactive, three dimensional Virtual Reality installation based on the popular Keralan legend of Perumtachan’s temple pond. The installation will allow spectators to experience and interact with a simulated environment through a head mounted display unit. The project aims to explore the artistic possibilities of Virtual Reality and questions religious indoctrination of legends by making them available for public access. The outcomes of the project will be the interactive site specific installation and a research paper. The Grantee's deliverables to IFA with the Final Report will be photo and video documentations, sketches, 3D models and prototypes, source codes, design iterations of the installation and the manuscript of the paper. Grant funds will pay for travel and living costs, equipment hire, disseminations costs, materials, printing and stationery, professional fees, workshop costs, and an accountant’s fee.
This Grant was Terminated by IFA and the Grantee is ineligible to apply to IFA in the future.
For documenting the complex and conflicted history of the evolution of the Malayalam script in the computer era through the exploration of the Rachana movement in Kerala. Outcomes of the project will include a free and open Malayalam font based on the original script, a website archiving published material related to the language campaign for the original script, and a book printed in this script narrating the history, evolution and present status of the Malayalam Lipi and Unicode language technology.
For research into the history and evolution of public transport in Kerala and the creation of a performance that will be staged on a bus. Engaging with local contexts, histories, literature and the everyday lives of people, the project will employ the bus as a travelling performance space that aims to explore new frameworks for performance and cultivate new audiences.
For research towards a book in Malayalam on women’s participation in three different performance traditions in Kerala—Kathakali, Singaari Melam and Mudiyattam. Through documentation and analysis of female interventionist strategies within the folk and classical arts, the project will shed light on emergent female aesthetics within these traditions and fill a serious gap in academic and popular perceptions of female performers in Kerala.
For an exploration of the body in pain through a re-visioning of Samuel Beckett’s play Act without Words I and Act Without Words II. An Argentinean story will be used to devise the plot and action, and introduce new meanings into Beckett’s plays. The production will also situate the experience of physical pain within the social context of the performers. A script in Malayalam will be developed and layered through games, and constant improvisations and experiments with actors.
For research leading to a monograph on the comic strip Cheriya Manushyarum, Valiya Lokavum (Small Men and the Big World) created by G.Aravindan, the internationally acclaimed film maker, which appeared in a Malayalam literary weekly from 1961 to 1973. Video interviews with cartoonists, scholars, family members, historians and readers and a bibliography of critical texts, essays and books on comics and graphic novels will be archived on the website of the Centre for Performance Research and Cultural Studies in South Asia.
For the development and staging of an adaptation of Macbeth in Malayalam. Using mobile scenic designs, choreography, multimedia images, ritual and a chorus, the production will explore the psychological complexities of the central characters and attempt to lay bare the emotions and thoughts that work at the level of the subconscious.
