The earth is a parchment on which things have been written and rewritten; altered and aligned; used and reused, believes well-known dancer Madhu Nataraj, founder of STEM Natya Dance Kampni, an institution that truly needs no introduction. This is why her latest production has the unusual title of ‘Palimpsest’, which refers to a manuscript or document from which the text has been erased or scraped off, only to be reused for another document.
The headliner of ‘FutureFantastic’, India’s first Artificial Intelligence (AI) and tech-art festival for climate change, ‘Palimpsest’ threw light on the rapid changes in the environment and reiterated the fact that planet Earth is indeed the most valuable palimpsest that human beings have ever had. “Palimpsest is a metaphor for the earth itself. We live in an era during which human interference has been the most destructive. We Indians think of the universe as being made from five elements of nature — earth, water, fire, wind and space. If you are in co-existence with all of them then it’s great. But the moment you disturb the balance, there is a climate emergency all over,” explains Madhu.
When the team of Jaaga put together a similar festival in 2017 titled ‘Bengaluru Fantastic’, Madhu created a unique art piece that involved dancers performing on a unicycle. Now, for ‘FutureFantastic’, she was extremely excited to bring together artistes from the world of technology, music and art to look at the future of tech and talk about climate change, a subject that is very close to her heart. The mixed-reality and mixed-media production had several talented artistes and groups joining hands like Jiayu Liu Studio (from London/ Beijing), Sam Mohan, Bhushan Bagadia and Team Gooey.in with music by M D Pallavi, Dheerendra Doss and Keerthi Kumar.
From the first appearance of humans on the planet to a glimpse of the water bodies of Bengaluru, the detailed piece merged technology and art to cover the many alarming aspects of climate change. “There was a piece on climate migration that showed people escaping the wrath of nature — people moving out of the Sunderbans and Indonesia moving its capital out of Jakarta. It’s like what are we waiting for?” she asks. The final bit of the performance involved an interaction with the audience and an indication to go back to the roots — to slow and sustainable living and tribal culture — that would help in the regeneration of the earth.
For an artiste, dealing with fast-paced technology could be an overwhelming affair. But Madhu believes that the power of collaboration can easily overcome that. “There is so much happening in the world of AI that keeping pace with the change is a challenge. But it’s often misunderstood that you can only do it if you have the know-how. Although I took some time to understand where my art and AI met, I feel if one just looks within and aligns with people who have a similar vision, then the process becomes easy and the reach becomes very high,” she says. This, she affirms, is all the more true for artistes who simply cannot exist in isolation. “Even when I started STEM in 1995 in my early 20s, I always believed in the power of collaboration or collective action of any kind. Artistes cannot work in isolation. We have to collaborate to bring about a change in the mindset of people and leave a better world for our children."