Spotlight on Paramita Saha, Director, Arts Forward Ideas and Events

Tell us about yourself.

I’ve been in the business of the arts since 2002, after I did my master’s in literature. I was already a dancer with a dance company, but in India, you need to have a main job and dance on the side. For artists, it’s more about finding a side hustle to your art. I was an artist, a dancer and a performer, but I was always an organizer, an administrator, a thinker, and a creator. I started working at this event management company which threw me right into how to create and produce performances from scratch. When you’re on stage, you don’t have control over a larger number of things. You just go, do your bit, and you’re done. When you are behind the scenes, you see that there are lots of things under your control and if you do them, everything gets better. I learned how to create, ideate, and grow things. It all started there.

At one point, I had a full-blown corporate job and traveled across India until 2009 when I got bored of everything because I felt as though it was taking away from my dance. Now I had the best of both worlds – I was in business and I was in the corporate space. I was on the other side of the table so to speak, but throughout it all, I was an artist. We were looking for funds, figuring out how to produce shows, and at the same time, I was also offering work to artists, as part of the corporate machine. In 2010, I thought I was in a very unique place because I knew the struggles of both sides, and what both sides needed, so I thought I could be a good facilitator, communicator, and middleman. I was in a unique position and felt as though I should use it for the artists because they need all the help that we can get. That’s where the Artsforward Ideas and Events journey began. We offered art as a service, and we were able to employ lots of artists.

In 2013, I was invited by Microsoft to design a project that spoke to the problem of electronic waste and a lot of young people were buying new phones and throwing away their old ones. It was a growing problem and more so in India because we have the largest youth population in the world. We have more phones than people. We used art to inspire and impact others. That project really changed my life and we worked with more than 8,000 youth directly on a daily basis. We created 70 changemakers from ages 18-25, ran extensive workshops, and made a bunch of artistic products from theatre, music, dance, visual art, and installation.

If you look at our website, we have a Venn diagram of artists, the community, and the businesses of the brand. These are all interconnected, and we are in-between. All my work after that has been related to advocacy. We worked on so many social issues, but it was always about how art can impact and create social change. The living proof of that is the young people that I’ve worked with during all these projects.

Tell us about the ArtAloneTogether project that you've undertaken during the pandemic. 

On March 15, 2020, I was out with my dance company shooting on the streets of the city. We were stopping buses and cars, and taking pictures. The next morning, things were getting closed down. One of our foreign dancers from the US couldn’t travel. All of March 16th, I was struggling from this claustrophobia and felt as if everything was closing in on me.

In the evening, the only way I thought we could deal with this situation was through art. By nighttime, I started an Instagram page called ArtAloneTogether - we can all be alone, but we can stay together through art. That was the very basic message that I sent out through Facebook and Instagram. I told my friends to start sending me their art, and I’ll put it on the page. On the 22nd, there was a curfew in India and we were told to stay in between 8am-8pm.
I thought, why not mark all of these hours?

I announced that we’d have an art curfew and feature one artwork every hour. That got picked up by a newspaper, and we were flooded with entries and able to present almost 4-5 pieces every hour. I was designing, curating, adapting, etc. It was such a high that by the end of the day, there were already 40 pieces online. Once the lockdown began, I decided it couldn’t stop, so I came up with creative prompts for five lockdown weekends. Every weekend, we had a new theme and I found a new collaborator or curator who was from that field, which allowed me to cast a wider net. I was blown away by the kind of work that we received.

I collaborated with another long-time friend and turned ArtAloneTogether into India’s first online festival. It had the same format of marking every hour, but now this was a festival. It was totally curated. All these artists were big artists. We were the first ticketed online event in India post lockdown. We sold about 300 tickets and split the profits 50/50 with the artists. It was a great success. It was fun to work with the artists and curate the work for an online space. Once I started looking at the festival submissions, I noticed they wouldn’t work. One can’t have 2D work and simply transfer work from the stage to the screen since the eye of the camera is really different. We started co-creating the work with the artist. The artists themselves felt it really changed the way they were looking at the work.

I crowdfund every year for At the Still Point, the title comes from a T.S. Eliot poem and indicates that all movement begins from stillness and all community efforts start from zero. As an artist, I always feel like the audience gets it really easy. Artists work too hard. We give our lives, our blood, our sweat, our money, and we work so hard to get an audience, and the audience buys a ticket, watches the show, and says it didn’t work for me. As artists, it is our responsibility to remind audiences of their stake in this performance – we’re making art for them – artists are going to be born from them, so they have to have a larger stake.

We started running the crowdfund as: here is the work, this is what it will cost, and now you (the audience) will fund it. We live streamed it and raised the highest amount of money ever which allowed us to pay all of the artists and venues their full amounts, and we even saved money for next year. We were working online and on the ground at the same time.

Given that you are deeply engaged in environmental work and e-waste management, what are three ways in which we can use the pandemic as a catalyst for change and work in a more sustainable manner moving forward? 

This pandemic taught us that you can do lots with very little. You can do with being inconvenienced, with being in a tight space. Artists in India were already used to that because we’re always in a tight space. We don’t really have a grant system and our national arts policy is in shambles. Considering the many thousand-year-old civilization that we have and the long and very deep engagement with the arts that runs in our blood, our present system is in shambles. We have to believe that this pandemic has not caused what we see, but it has just been a mirror to show us that these problems were already there. We have to be arts managers and artists at the same time. We have to collaborate and learn to trust, something that artists don’t do. Artists don’t delegate. They cannot trust. They flinch from collaborating. We’ve seen the collaborations from these times happening across the world, and the kind of work being made by two people talking to each other across the world and time zones, and creating work together. This pandemic takes us away from buying those expensive flight tickets and teaches us to work in the local community. It has taught us how to exist together in a small space and believe that when you send your work out to that tiny zoom box, someone will watch you. This has been a fantastic catalyst for working with what we have. That is itself so sustainable because if you have one mug of water, you will make every drop count. We are used to wasting so much water. If you could only go out once a week, how will you make the best of it?

I stopped buying things three years back because I already have too much and I wouldn’t go out every day because I live far from the city, and it makes no sense to travel every day and burn so much fuel. The pandemic reinforced my beliefs and my heart, and I feel I can communicate what I want to say in a far more legible manner because people now see the value of one cup of coffee with friends. There is more value added to every moment.

In our very fast paced culture, we have lost this. When you are running, nothing slow is convenient. The environment doesn’t advocate speed. It advocates depth and real slowness, and real engagement, and really working on the circle of how nature works, which humans have forgotten. Humans work linearly while nature works circularly. It’s been a great moment to find that and deep dive into it. That’s the future and there’s no other way. We’re already passed tipping points. I think artists now more than ever have a role to play in that change. The art we make is not about us. It’s about resistance. It’s about standing there and just existing. Things aren’t going to get any better. Art can be everywhere. We can use it as a medium for everything we want to say.

You are presenting a Regional Update and hosting a Coffee Klatch topic at the upcoming Virtual Edition: 2021 ISPA Congress. Tell us what you are hoping to learn or gain from a virtual congress, as opposed to an in-person setting.

I do have screen fatigue. Already this month, I’m starting physical shows, and just initiated a weekend of physical performances. We’re calling it Reclaim because we’re sending artists out to reclaim the outdoor spaces. We don’t want to be in these boxes anymore.

Having said that, ISPA is much more than just being about artists. ISPA is also about conversations and that doesn’t really matter if you’re meeting in person or on the screen. I’ve somehow felt that online conversations are more intimate and people are more present, more engaged. When I’m sitting in a hall, I could be looking at my phone and drifting off. It’s a huge privilege to be able to sit in a nice room, drink my coffee, access the arts and people from across the world, and have a heart to heart conversation. If I have it, I’m going to make the best of it.

This year has been such a discovery. I trained in Butoh from a teacher in Mexico. I’m able to log into any museum's website and look at their art, and learn from any master at any dance studio. For those who have the privilege, I think it’s been the best year in many ways. If you can’t go out, you can only go in, so you might as well use that opportunity and deep dive.