Watch these spaces

A rising number of public venues in the city are becoming vibrant cultural hubs. In the past month alone, the Bandra Fort Amphitheatre has hosted four free music gigs, reports Purva Mehra.

Rock group Something Relevant is ready to release its first album, Feels Good to Be Live, the title referring to Rang Bhavan.

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The band has applied to the municipal corporation for permission to perform an acoustic, or mike-less, concert at this venue to launch the album. Once synonymous with rock shows, Rang Bhavan has been lying idle since it became part of a silent zone demarcated by the municipal corporation five years ago.

“Throughout college, we attended concerts there,” said Stuart DaCosta, the band’s bassist.

“But by the time we formed the band, it was too late to perform there. We live in such fragmented times. We have no sense of community and need to urgently encourage culturally unifying events.”

Many citizens groups are, however, doing just that by taking over the maintenance of public venues and making them available to performers. (See box).

For instance, last Saturday, Mumford & Sons, an indie folk quartet from the U.K. entertained the audience with their fluid ballads at the Bandra Fort Amphitheatre. At the end of the show, Only Much Louder, the event and talent management company that brought the group to the city, promised the audience it would return with more performances.

“The city has a host of such venues that should be utilised more frequently,” said Neale Murray, director of the bi-annual Celebrate Bandra Festival, which organises performances at the amphitheatre, the suburb’s church compounds and parks and its three promenades – Carter Road, Bandstand and Reclamation.

The Reclamation promenade cannot normally host events. The Maharashtra State Road Development Corporation, which manages the stretch, must get special permission from the central ministry of environment and forests if it wants to let it out for a show.

“But we made it available for the Bandra Festival as it is a citizens’ initiative,” said Vivek Ghanekar, the Corporation’s superintendent engineer.

The imaginative use of public spaces is not limited to Bandra. Horniman Circle has been a favourite with Prithvi Theatre since 1998 and hosts its plays on one weekend every month.

This year, if it had not rained unseasonally in November, the gardens would have for the first time hosted a daily music gig along with plays during Prithvi’s annual festival.

Marine Drive has also become an open-air gallery this month, offering pedestrians a chance to view Earth from Above, an exhibition of photographs on climate change that is part of the French Bonjour India Festival and runs until January 10.

“There is a paucity of venues for big shows,” said Girish ‘Bobby’ Talwar, founder of Only Much Louder. “In a city where there are so many silent zones we must identify venues for cultural activities.”