Soprano in flow

Fri, May 16 12:45 AM

Starz - Music4Kids by Kids' is the unusual show billed at Kamani Auditorium for Wednesday, May 21 at 6.30 pm. Thirteen-year-old soprano Tara Venkatesan, who sang to much acclaim at the lovely old Museum Theatre in Madras this January, will present a programme of songs from opera and ballet (young Kuchipudi dancer Yamini Reddy will dance an item, too).

The French School children's choir will also sing and there will be music on the piano, violin and flute. The show is a benefit concert for SOS Children's Villages and Tara, a Delhi girl, is the pupil of our city's one trueblue opera teacher, Situ Singh Buehler.

Tara also trained in Vienna recently and her personal musical journey as a soprano-in-training began at age seven with her guru. The dozen items range from Mozart, Rossini and Cesar Franck to The Lion King and The Sound of Music, with the surprise inclusion of one appropriately lovely poem in Tamil by Subrahmania Bharati (Odi vilayaadu paapa, meaning, Bhago, khelo, bachhe), that's been set to music.

Passes at The Neemrana Shop and Full Circle, Khan Market, the Alliance Francaise, 72, Lodi Estate and SOS Villages of India, A-7 Nizamuddin West. Do go, it sounds delightful.

The Golden Egg Shriram Bharatiya Kala Kendra's annual ballet festival comes to an end this evening with a performance of Parikrama at 7.00 p.m.

at Kamani Auditorium, Copernicus Marg. Choreography by Shashidharan Nair, music by Shubha Mudgal, directed by Shobha Deepak Singh.

Tickets: Rs 500, 300, 200, 100. I haven't seen this SBKK production but the theme sounds quite promising, because it tries to physicalise some very abstract Indian ideas.

It literally means 'circling' (or 'circumambulation', a horrid, heavy word, meaning walking around a temple or shrine in a circle, clockwise). It's also about the soul's journey to a higher level of God-realisation, it's also the birth to death cycle of every person's life, and it's also the Indian Big Bang theory of Creation: of the Golden Egg, the Hiranya-garbha.

Lots a dance-drama can do with it. Go see, go see.

Wurst case scenario 'Fluxus', meaning flow in Latin, another unlovely word, was an 'intermedia' movement to counter 'high art', that was considered new in the West 30 years ago (think Marcel Duchamp, the potty man). It comes to the National Gallery of Modern Art until June 4, a medley of films, fotos, installations, videos, fearfully dated but good for drama and art students to see without the bother and expense of going abroad.

More than 300 original works are promised by Joseph Beuys, John Cage, Ben Patterson, Nam June Paik, Dieter Roth, Wolf Vostell, Daniel Spoerri and others. What concerns us is Ben Patterson's performance tonight at the NGMA, based on bits of Lewis Carroll.

Before that, there's a guided tour of the intermedia art by a German art historian to set the mood. Entry free.

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