Pickle Factory Season One

Project Details:

The Pickle Factory Dance Foundation is a hub for the practice, presentation and discourse of dance and movement-based performance in India, housed in spaces converted for the arts in the architecturally textured cityscape of Calcutta. Attempting to build a critical culture and community, it asks what it means to create, share and reflect on making movement-based work in a shifting and uniquely Indian context, while being closely connected to an international network of similar endeavours. Pickle Factory’s inaugural season wrapped itself around four key words – dance, movement, practice, discourse. Season One opened up the various ways one can look at performance work originating from movement artists and the trained, moving, performing body. The programme located itself in diverse lenses through which to view and perceive work, offering a pluralism of experience and expression.

Pickle Factory Season One ran from 7 February to 11 March, and comprised a residency with Edinburgh-based choreographer Janis Claxton; an exhibition of film and photographic installations on the moving body; and a performance festival at Gem Cinema. The festival reclaimed Gem Cinema, the first 70mm standalone cinema in Calcutta, now disused, as venue to host a one-of-a-kind coming together for the internationally acclaimed dance and movement work of four Indian artists: Padmini Chettur, Daminee Benny Basu, Preethi Athreya and Kapila Venu. The Pickle Factory dream is to grow into a permanent venue in a converted space – the first such venue dedicated to the movement arts in India.

Artsforward was the the PR and Communication partner for Season I.