The India Dance Festival received just a little less attention from the national media this weekend than the Amsterdam Dance Event. Something that made theatre director Leo Spreksel of Korzo Theatre in The Hague a bit worried on Sunday. Because his halls have been so packed for three days now that he even had to turn away visitors who came all the way from Switzerland. Moreover, the Korzo audience is more colourful than at many a dance party in Amsterdam. That there are fewer deaths is a nice side note.
The India Dance Festival is celebrating its first anniversary this year. Spreksel, himself a lover of Indian dance culture, started it for artistic reasons. He then found out that there is a very large Hindustani community living in and around The Hague that likes to come and see high-quality art from India. With that, the festival fits into a Hague multicultural tradition, which, in addition to the well-known Pasar Malam (now Tong Tong Fair) also the literary festivals Winternachten (Writers Unlimited) and Crossing Border yielded.
This year, the opening weekend of India Dance was all about Philip Glass. The American composer of minimal music had, after very long negotiations, given permission for a special adaptation of his opera Satyagraha from 1979. A few weeks before the festival, this allowed professional Indian dancers, professional musicians from the Residentie Orkest and amateurs from two major choirs to start rehearsing this opera: the Hindustan-Indian choir founded in 2013 Zangam and the Dario Fo choir, left over from the estate of the illustrious Westland folk opera company Dario Fo.
Because of that short preparation time, only a short version of Glass' three-hour opera was on show this year: only the first act was danced, sung and played, and it looked good, especially when you realise that there was only time for four rehearsals. All hope, then, that things will turn out well when the big version of Satyagraha will be staged during next year's festival at the Zuiderstrand Theatre. Then with full orchestra, twice as many choristers and even more dancers. With so much local and international talent on stage, even then it will be no problem to fill up the auditorium some evening, even if only with friends and family of the participants.
The low interest from the Amsterdam-based media may also have been caused by this aspect. After all, these do not normally pay attention to amateur art, unless it is a single performance by the Amsterdam company Toetssteen, the Shakespeare tradition in Diever in Drenthe or the five-yearly Passiespelen in Tegelen. You guessed it: a rich white and Western tradition, which still has little to do with the large non-Western communities in the Randstad.
Culture in the Netherlands is thus kept strictly apart along ethnic dividing lines on several levels: Antilleans in De Balie, Hindus in The Hague, Cape Verdians in Rotterdam, Dutch in the Stadsschouwbrug. Meanwhile, we in the art media continue to use the phenomenon of 'real art' as an excuse to avoid travelling to The Hague because of the risk of imperfect amateurs.
Perhaps it is just as well that real culture is less and less of that kind of officialdom. The halls in The Hague are full, the singing and dancing are convincing, the music sounds puffy, and afterwards you can also have a great meal for a euro.
The India Dance Festival lasts until 31 October.
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