The Urur-Olcott Kuppam Festival hopes to heal art, and help art heal by opening art and artists to new audiences and different environments. The vizha made its debut in January 2015 at Urur-Olcott Kuppam in Chennai with the waves and the gentle breeze providing the perfect foil to the music and dance performances that included Karnatic music, Kattaikuttu, Paraiattam and Bharathnatyam. The vizha in 2016 promises to carry on the spirit and fervour of the previous year.
The project attempts to change certain divisive stereotypes about arts and people, and the places where they reside. It challenges the prevalent notion that Classical music and associated dance forms, their practitioners and audiences are refined, and folk music, dances and audiences are crude. It presents a rich mix of South India's arts to audiences that normally would not have access to it by bringing the arts, artists and audiences out of the ghettoes that they have pushed themselves into.
We live in a time of vitiated social relations -- people are divided by religion, caste and class. This festival has never been just about music and dance, but about the possibilities that these arts offer in uniting people in an act of celebration. The festival is also being designed as a celebration that will relieve some of the trauma suffered by people hurt by the 2015 floods, and as a thanksgiving to those who readily jumped in to help with relief, rescue and rehabilitation efforts.
In the long-term, we hope that this effort will help correct prevalent notions about arts, artists, audiences and the performing spaces that they should remain within. Music and arts are capable of bridging across cultures and civilisations and liberating us from artificial divisions of caste and race.
