As the year winds down, so do the amount of events happening around the city, with people getting prepared to take their holiday time. This may well be the last events posting we do here at AGI in 2013, in which case, we wish you a very happy holiday season and look forward to seeing you in the new year!
Celebrating 100 years of Indian cinema Nrityakala the Rhythm presents: Kaleidoscope, a show that offers popular old to new songs and dances from Indian cinema in different eras ranging from classical to modern/contemporary highlighting the influence of Indian cinema particularly on the different generations abroad. Location: the Nehru Centre. Time: Thursday, 12 December at 6:30pm.
Mystic Voices – The Bhakti Tradition: Spirituality in Words, Music & Poetry will be at the Queen Elizabeth Hall (Southbank Centre) on Saturday, 14 December 2013 at 7:30pm. Two of the finest exponents of the Bhakti tradition sing in khyal and dhrupad styles. Sama continues its Mystic Voices series, exploring spirituality in the musical, poetic and oral traditions of South Asia. Ashwini Bhide Deshpande is an outstanding vocalist of the famed ‘Jaipur-Atrauli’ Khyal vocal tradition and is one of the foremost representatives of a new generation of singers. Umakant and Ramakant Gundecha are among the most renowned performers of Dhrupad (traditional sung poetry of Northern India), the oldest vocal genre in the Hindustani classical tradition. Book your tickets here.
The Japan Foundation will close out its schedule of events for this year with a book launch on December 11 and a public seminar on the 13th. In a special launch of the new book Tales from a Mountain Cave by Hisashi Inoue, the translator Angus Turvill will discuss the author and the places that feature in the book. He will discuss connections between the work and the classic folklore collection Tono Monogatari by Kunio Yanagita. Turvill will also read from the book and discuss some of the translation issues that he faced. And, in the public seminar, members of a team involved in ‘Rethinking Battleship Island‘ (a famous abandoned island in Japan that used to be the most densely populated place on the planet) talk about their troubled attempts to map the island, and to come to terms with an uncanny sense of temporal disjunction caused by a future that seems, already, to have come to pass. The event will feature a thirty-minute film by visual artist Lee Hassall (University of Worcester), supported by short papers on the past, present and future of Hashima (Battleship Island) from Dr Mark Pendleton (University of Sheffield), Professor Carl Lavery (University of Glasgow), and Dr Peter Matanle (University of Sheffield), who has been conducting his own research on the island. Both events are free, but please book your place by RSVPing to event@jpf.org.uk.
If you have an event you would like to share, please contact us.
Information compiled by Tim Holm
