Indika 2023 opens next month, bringing Indian art to every corner of Merseyside, in one of their biggest programmes of music and live art to date.
Ahead of this year’s launch I wanted to know more about the ins and outs of Indika, and Milap. Alok Nayak, Artistic Director of the programme has been involved since its inception. His passion for the programme, and for bringing art to all shines through:
You’ve been with Milap since its beginnings. How have you seen it change over the years?
Milap has changed dramatically in the scale and scope of what it offers people, but essentially it still fulfils its mission from the early days – to promote cultural diversity and bring people together.
Today, we do this with the guiding words ‘Uniting Hearts Through Arts’, but the idea behind Milap has always been to share Indian arts and culture with people of all backgrounds. Early on, Milap would bring the best Indian classical artists to the city, and this included the type of big names, like Zakir Hussein, who you normally only could hear live in London.
Milap also promoted artists like Nitin Sawhney and Talvin Singh in their early careers, through festivals and cultural events at The Bluecoat and Liverpool Central library. Today, Milap does produce festivals and so much more; our big focus is in developing Indian arts and artists more widely, through career pathway programmes, we design education initiatives, and produce our own music and dance content, including the work of our own band, Tarang. From our base in Liverpool, we operate nationally and internationally.
Over the coming years, we want to establish Liverpool as an international centre for Indian arts, and will be drawing more people into the city.
For anyone who’s never been to Indika, or even Milap what is it that brings the festival to life?
Indika is brought alive by the mood of the festival – a positive, uplifting and inspirational feeling that is created both by the artistry and imagination of our performers, but also by the closeness they have with audiences.
We want to make audiences know that Indian arts are for anyone, whether you have experience and knowledge of them or not. For instance, through the medium of Indian classical dance, we’ll be telling the story of the 10th century origins of the board game Snakes & Ladders, in Parama Padam on Friday 3rd November. Audiences can also hear the music of a brand new band, The Indika Collective, on Saturday 11th,which will include musicians and singers who will t share the rich emotions of folk, Bollywood and classical music.
Indian arts tell stories of mythology and people, and are rich in colour, rhythms and improvisations that can leave lifelong memories. Bharatnatyam is an Indian classical dance form that does just this, and we have one of the stars of that style, in Harinie Jeevatha, performing on Thursday 2nd November at the Unity Theatre. We want to give you joyous experiences that change how you feel.
What’s the purpose of Indika? I’m particularly keen to know how it support artists, but also if there is an aim to present Liverpool as a hub for the vibrant artistry you share.
Watching great performances has all sorts of amazing benefits. The purpose of Indika is to give people hope, joy and a feeling of harmony. We want people of all cultures and ages to come together and enjoy amazing stories, brilliant music and imaginative choreography.
Particularly now, artists are struggling for the opportunity to perform live, and artists love to share their work with people who might not have ever seen their style and approach before. While there’s a massive appetite for audio and video content consumed online, there is nothing like the live experience, and this supports artists in their careers, but also gives audiences what they need. And yes, we absolutely want to make sure Liverpool is known as an international hub for Indian arts. It is a place where culture and integration are celebrated. It has been our home since 1985, but we want to make sure people from all over the world know it for Milap and our work.
What was the driver to build the programme out into the rest of the region?
Not only Indika, but Milap’s performance programme throughout the year will take place around Liverpool’s city region, and this is to reach audiences who normally don’t have the chance to witness great art on their doorstep. It’s not easy, for many cultural and financial reasons, to always have the opportunity to go and see live performances, and we know that we can help to change the lives of many more people outside the city centre.
We want to work with some of the excellent companies and venues around the region, like Shakespeare North and Future Yard, for instance, to take Indian music and dance to new places in new ways. This should help to also engage and support people of South Asian origin, to whom these art forms belong, as well as helping to unite people of all backgrounds, by showcasing the best of Indian arts to everyone.
We have already taken part in festivals in Knowsley and education events in Sefton to help build our programme and there is evidence of demand for and interest in Indian arts around the region.
There’s a fantastic line up, and they all bring something unique, but are there are artists you’re particularly enjoying working with ahead of this year’s Indika? Or any that are bringing something new?
Some artists are bringing their skills and imagination to help lift our festival up through improvisations, compositions and choreography that they have performed elsewhere but never for Liverpool audiences, and this includes the brilliant Sitarist Shakir Khan, opening the festival with tabla player Shahbaz Hussein on Wednesday 1st Novmeber.
The other evenings in the Music room, the first ever performance in the UK by Harinie Jeevatha, and the concert by Swati Natekar, are other examples of that. But we are also bringing you some original work too, and you can look out for the Indika Collective, a Milap-produced group of artists who are creating especially for Indika, and the Milap X Mellowtone gig at The Everyman on Thursday 9th November will feature a collaboration between two guitarist – songwriters Vedanth Bharadwaj and SJ Downes.
It is exciting to work on producing new work which will be showcased at Indika;
we’re also delighted to have secured the return of Talvin Singh to Liverpool; after last year’s brilliant performance at The Tung, he will return an ensemble of artists on Sunday 5th November, while he shares music from his new album for the first time in the UK at our festival.
You’ve got a long relationship with Liverpool Hope and the Capstone Theatre, but this year sees a wide reaching spread of new venues, including the Everyman, the Tung Auditorium and the Philharmonic Music Room. What are you hoping the new stages will bring?
We have presented performances at The Unity Theatre and Liverpool Philharmonic Hall as far back as the 90s, and so we are bringing Indian arts back to those venues. The Unity is perfectly set up for intimate Indian dance performances, in which you can see the gestures and facial expressions of the performers really well.
The Music Room too, is a wonderful space for music, as you can enjoy the amazing acoustics and really immerse yourself in all of the emotions and moods that Indian concerts convey.
For a festival, a variety of spaces allows us to create a programme with a range of diverse styles. You can enjoy music downstairs at the Everyman, a popular space for cosy gigs that can be groundbreaking at the same time. Within the same week, you can witness the contemporary, moody electronic experiments from Talvin Singh’s new music at the grander setting of the Tung, and also relaxed, laid back beats in a café like 92 degrees.
The new stages, including Bundobust Café, allow us to reach out to so many different audiences too, who might choose a venue that is most familiar to them, or one they’ve always wanted to try.
We will be back at the Capstone too, a wonderful space for dance and music, with a superb production, ‘The Forest Dream’. In short, the new stages help us to give our audiences more choice than ever before, and we are sure that families and audiences of all ages and backgrounds will have something they can relate to.
Indika launches 1st Novemeber in various venues, and runs until 12th November.
Interview, Patrick Kirk-Smith. With thanks to Alok Nayak, CEO & Artistic Director of Milap and Indika
