Four or five programmes will be streamed daily on the website, Kalakendra.com. “There will be Thiruppavai sessions in the morning and in the afternoons and evening, there will be concerts. Bharatanatyam performances, lecture-demonstrations and Tamil dramas will also be streamed. The month-long digital festival will feature some of the big names in the performing arts space like Sudha Raghunathan, S Sowmya, Sanjay Subrahmanyan, Nithyashree Mahadevan, Ranjani-Gayatri, Vishaka Hari, Trichur Brothers, Unnikrishnan, Jayanthi Kumaresh, Kanyakumari, Akkarai Sisters, Embar Kannan, Shobana, Priyadarsini Govind, Dushyanth Sridhar just to name a few,” he adds. Harishankar explains that most of the artists are eagerly looking forward to the virtual festival. “We have tried and accommodated as many musicians and dancers as possible. At present, they are recording at various city sabhas. It is a strange/new experience for many of them because there are no audience and only video cameras that capture their performances. They also felt like coming back home after a long time. Two days ago, while Bharatanatyam dancer Priyadarsini Govind was recording her portion, she felt it different. She told me that it was like doing her arangetram all over again because she didn’t perform on a stage for a long period.”
