Beyond Boundaries: Mandala Maker Festival Moves to Devon Avenue

Sonny Mehta and Riyaaz Qawwali will perform at Mandala Maker Festival.

Pranita Nayar is the founder and executive artistic director of Mandala South Asian Performing Arts. She is a celebrated dancer and choreographer in the classical Indian dance form Bharata Natyam, but her organization presents performances by South Asian artists who are working across disciplines—which Nayar is quick to point out are inextricable from one another. Nayar is organizing the Mandala Maker Festival, which will run Sundays on June 4 and June 11 in the heart of Little India on Devon Avenue. The free festival, which features music, dance and storytelling by more than a dozen artists of the South Asian diaspora, is now in its fifth year. Nayar spoke with me about this year’s iteration, reflecting poetically on the layers of culture and creative practice of artists whose lives and work traverse boundaries and borders, and the constant evolution of art and its audiences.

When did you found Mandala?

It was founded in 2014. I felt there was a need in the South Asian diaspora to look at art beyond the boundaries of India. My own background had been in classical Indian dance, but as I met people, interacting with newcomers and already established people, whether they followed emigrating routes through the West Indies, East Africa, South Africa, East Asia, England, Middle East, they all had a second layer of cultural practices fused with their own South Asian identities. I felt there needed to be a home, that if they checked off a box that said “South Asian” what do their artistic expressions look like? What are the dreams and desires they associate with?

You recently relocated Mandala’s headquarters to Devon Avenue which, of course, seems like a natural home for Mandala, but what prompted the move?

The first immigrants that came from the Indian south continent established their home on Devon and soon it became a vibrant community known as Little India or Little South Asia. We wanted to be a part of that vibrancy, part of that cultural corridor. More and more people from different nationalities come to Devon, but they all have had some experience with Indian dance and music—whether it went to Bangladesh, Malaysia, Sri Lanka—it fused with the local artistic practices there to become something new. Whether it fused with the language there or the rhythms or instrumentation, it was a move to be more inclusive of all these cultural practices in Mandala programming.

Dancer and multidisciplinary artist Shalaka Kulkarni will perform at Mandala Maker Festival./Photo: Rich Rankin.

Has being in that corridor influenced you or Mandala’s artists?

Yes. I find the slower the process, the more effective it is. We found that people are moving away from classicism as such, which requires a highbrow practice and thinking. They are more into a hybridization of different dance and music practices coming together. I think within the organization we’ve become very good at identifying “this comes from this part of South Asia, and this comes from this part and where do they meet?” That has a lot to do with my own background in ethnomusicology and dance ethnography; I’m able to peel off layers and look in what direction things are going. I’m sure you see that in classical ballet as well.

Sure and, as you say, most dancers are not trying to preserve movement in a museum. It’s always growing and changing.

The classicism survived in a particular culture with a particular body type and a particular social mentality. It’s a great discipline, it’s a great practice, but where are the consumers of it? Where are the participants?

On that note, let’s talk a little about the festival. I think of your organization as dance-based, but this is clearly a multidisciplinary festival.

I will say the organization is dance-based in one sense, but none of the art forms emerging from South Asia are independent of each other. Especially in South Asia: The dancer needs to know the music, the musician needs to know the dance, the stories, the literature, everything behind it. In our bodies, as the artistic director, I’m a dancer, but the vision is much further.

The Aqil Brothers will perform at Mandala Maker Festival.

What are some highlights?

In music, Sonny Mehta is one of our musicians. His forte is finding parallels between music of Qawwali [spiritual music rooted in South Asia and Islam] with that of Black gospel music. There are many similarities between the two genres: they’re both spiritual communities; they have call-and-response, a desiring of union with the supreme through the music without talking about it in terms of a church or mosque.

In dance, we’re going to have Radia Ali. She uses spoken word and has elements of social justice in her piece—the peaceful resolutions to issues and ability to express themselves from her own background as a Muslim woman. Of course, there will be classical Bharata Natyam and Kathak. And Bollywood Groove will be there doing Bollywood dancing.

Is there anything else about the festival you’d like to mention?

We hope to bring many communities together through the festival. It’s okay to be siloed in different groups, but it’s more important how they come together.

Mandala Maker Festival, in the parking lot of Republic Bank of Chicago, 2720 West Devon. Sunday, June 4 and Sunday, June 11, 2pm-8pm. Free.