It’s been more than six months since the world went into a lockdown, economies crumbled, and so did jobs. What the pandemic couldn’t shake are the faith and passion among artists to keep going, and helping the community in navigating through Covid-19.
Asian Voice reached out to South Asian Arts (SAA-UK) to know how its activities took shape during the past six months in the pandemic to entertain and comfort people with the beauty of art and entertainment.
Barbara Cardone, Marketing and Audience Development Officer, said that the past six months have been a challenging time. Cardone said, “But as it is often the case, challenge brought us to re-invent ourselves and find new ways to continue supporting people during this period of uncertainty.” She also acknowledged that as a charity committed to delivering a public service, it was disappointing in mid-March having to suspend their regular performance programme and weekly classes across the city of Leeds, and any upcoming live project.
“However, in just a couple of weeks we were ready to launch our digital series of live performances in Indian classical music and dance – Baithak LIVE. This new format, inspired by the tradition of intimate concerts usually held in a person's private home with an audience of around 10-30 people, aspires to be a practical alternative to live performances in venues, providing artists with a digital space where they can give talks, perform as a soloist or as a group, all from their own living room,” she added.
Like many other members and businesses in the arts community who turned to digital medium during the pandemic, SAA-UK almost immediately switched to online classes, which according to Cardone, allowed 130 students to keep learning together and their music and dance tutors to continue sharing their art forms and thrive in the face of adversity.
She said, “Especially during the first few weeks of lockdown, we thought it was very important to communicate that social distancing shouldn't lead to social disconnection, we encouraged our students to practice their dance steps around the house, to play their instruments and sing with their families, and in general discover what the “new normal” looked like for them. This is something that we continue to discuss with students, artists and audiences in various settings: for example, on the 21st of October we presented a Navratri event, which was live streamed on YouTube and was introduced by a talk about dancers’ experiences in lockdown.”
Cardone explained that this conversation added to the many more events that SAA-UK had in the past few months, and has also allowed the organisation to reflect on the many things that this new situation enabled it to do and that would have never been possible otherwise. She said, “For instance, at the ninth edition of our annual all-night Summer Solstice Festival, we were able to present 10 Indian classical musicians, performing live from 3 different countries, to a world-wide audience.”
