The value of art

AVToday: Can you tell a little about your background?

Krishna: I spent my childhood in Kodaikanal and studied in the Kodaikanal International School. In fact, we had some children from Auroville in the school. I remember there was a child from Auroville in my class and whenever his father visited, he would play the guitar and tell us stories, and all of us really loved it.

How did you decide to be a dancer?

Initially, I thought I would become a doctor like my parents, or a research scientist, but the teacher for my first biology class made it so boring that I gave up the idea. I had taken up Bharatanatyam dance in school and I loved it. We had an excellent teacher (Roshan Vajifdar Ghosh). She never taught me the traditional dance pieces, the submissive woman stuff. She choreographed her own pieces like Tagore’s poem: where the mind is without fear. She influenced my thinking without talking much to me, just by her way of being and she made me understand that dance is connected to everything. My understanding of being a woman and sexuality was deeply influenced by the pieces she choreographed for me. Interestingly, she was a devotee of Sri Aurobindo and the Mother. So, at the age of 15, I decided that I was going to be a dancer and my parents were very open about it.

After school, I joined the dance college of Kalakshetra Foundation in Chennai. After completing the course, I was part of Chandralekha’s dance group for 10 years from 1989 to 1999. From 1995 onward, I also started working with my friend Padmini Chettur in her dance group, performing contemporary dance.

At some point you stopped dancing? Why?

The kind of dance I did was very truthful and one was required to be very honest while doing it. Padmini was not only a choreographer but also a close friend and one day she told me that whatever the movement she asked me to do, the only thing that was expressed was pain. Once I was doing a movement and suddenly I was looking inside myself and there was this deep well of darkness inside. Around that time, I also had a bike accident and the ACL ruptured in my left knee. I realised I had to make a quick decision to stop dance or I would have more accidents and injuries. I was one of the oldest dancers in Padmini’s group, having danced with her for the longest duration. I told her that I would not participate in new dance pieces but would complete the performance tours for the existing pieces. Also, my marriage had ended in 2006 and I was living by myself which left me relatively free. I had already started looking at something to do with the environment and ecological sciences, and wanted to live in a place where there were trees and forests and I could see the stars at night. But I wasn’t thinking specifically of Auroville.

How did you come to Auroville?

I had family friends in Pondicherry and while visiting them in 2006, I went along with one of them to attend a tai chi class. Marco was conducting the class and I realised that he was an extraordinary teacher. At that time, the classes were held every Tuesday and Wednesday. So, every week I would travel from Chennai to attend the tai chi classes. I would come by bus and then hire a bike. I did this from 2006 to 2008.

How did you meet your husband, Christoph?

I met him here in Auroville in 2009 when we worked together on the first film festival. And then in 2010, a small group of Aurovilians decided to go on a trek to the Himalayas and Christoph and I got together on this beautiful trek. The trek was very interesting because all of us decided to do a large part of it in silence and in meditation.

And you have continued with tai chi till now?

Oh yes! That’s the main thing for me and I keep it as my structure in Auroville. Otherwise, I feel that Auroville has so many interesting activities and people that it would be very easy for me to get involved in a number of things.

Everything I do relates to my tai chi in some way. Tai chi is the study of chi (energy) in the body and the movement of chi within oneself and in the world around you. It is about learning how to actively guide that chi within you and outside of you. Whatever I take up, whether it is art service or film festival or any kind of task force in Auroville, I always ask myself: does it relate back to my practice of tai chi in some way?

How did the Art Service start and what do you do for it?

I’ve been the manager for Art Service from the time it started in 2012. It started from the Integral Sustainability Platform (ISP). Marco took me to the meetings and one group in the ISP was about art and culture in Auroville. From the discussions, it emerged very clearly that we needed a separate service for artists.

Before the Art Service came along, artists were working in isolation, struggling to do what they do and offer it to Auroville. Since they had no combined platform, it was easy to ignore their voices and the needs of this sector, even though there are about 200 artists in Auroville. When we formed this platform, the idea was to make this sector known. We do it through a website where you can find out who is doing what in this sector in Auroville.

The basic principle of Art Service is that beauty, harmony and art should be offered freely in Auroville because this is what Mother said in A Dream. So, as an Aurovilian, you can walk into Bharat Nivas or CRIPA or MMC (multimedia centre) and watch a movie or a play or a music show free of charge. This puts a lot of responsibility on the people working in this sector. For example, anybody who puts on a play has to find the money for it themselves and cannot or, rather, will not, raise it from the audience.

What else do you do?

I am also a member of the Funds and Asset Resource Group (FARG) which does research for the Funds and Asset Management Committee (FAMC). If the FAMC needs some information or research done for any decision to be made regarding a unit or any activity of Auroville, they can ask the FARG to do it. It’s very interesting for me to see the internal decision-making processes in Auroville.

How did you get involved in the Auroville film festival?

In September 2008, Marco and Liliana said to me, “Well, how about moving to Auroville and starting a film festival? We want to start it and can you help to organize it? We want somebody with your skills.” By that time, I had become very close to Marco and Liliana and had developed a deep love and respect for them. I was in my 40s when I decided to move to Auroville in 2008. As a dancer, one does many different things to earn money, and one of the things I had done was event organization. I was a partner in a company which used to organise rock concerts in Chennai. Hence, I didn’t have a problem in organising the film festival, but I learnt to do it in the Auroville way. First, Marco announced it and then people who were interested got together. It was always a teamwork. I only do the administration part of it.

The main aim of Auroville is human unity and we have a category which helps us pick films from around the world on this theme. But we also have films made about Auroville and by Aurovilians. Earlier, it was always outside filmmakers coming in and making films about Auroville, interpreting what is happening here. And then slowly, over the last ten years, we have had a growing band of Aurovilian filmmakers who express from within what Auroville is all about. These films are very different.

Having a film festival in Auroville has also brought film-making into the Auroville schools. Students now have the option to learn it and they also know that if they make a film, they have a place to show it. In the last two years we also have some very interesting filmmakers in the bio-region working in different ways and taking up different kinds of stories. We are proud that we can show their work.

This year, for the first time, the film festival couldn’t be held in Auroville because of COVID. We decided to go online so that anyone anywhere could watch the films. When we closed the AVFF 2022, we came to know that 1260 persons had tuned into the event. This led to 2990 streams, mostly from Asia (2530), followed by Europe (246), North America (110) and Australia (49). In other words, it was a great success: many more people had watched the films than otherwise would have been possible.