At the Indian Botanical Gardens

Teachers and some children from Talimi Haq School visited the Indian Botanical Gardens, in Shibpur, Howrah, on 21 January. This was an outing proposed by Carolyn Stephens, while she was here to make a documentary video for putting up on YouTube.

Articles

Eeva Puumala, a research fellow at the Tampere Peace Research Institute, in Tampere, Finland, had visited Talimi Haq School in Dec 2006, while working on her paper on migrant labourers in Calcutta. Eeva was a participant in the Fourth Winter Course on Forced Migration organised by the Calcutta Research Group.

Read Eeva's essay "What is it to be many? Iconic migrant and the gaze of the stranger" here (open in a new window).

Here are links to some more articles about / from Talimi Haq School. (Open the links in new windows.)

"In Search of Ramrajya", essay written on the occasion of the 50th anniversary of India's independence, 15 August 2007.

"Design is Love", in ADA, Mail of the Month (from Sweden), Dec 2007.

"The Right to Education and a Pedagogy for Hope: a view of Talimi Haq School", by Sohel Firdos, et al. This would appear in the forthcoming book Quality and Inequality: Interrogating School Education in Andhra Pradesh and West Bengal, edited by Manabi Majumdar & Jos Mooij.

"Using hope as a method of understanding poverty and empowerment in Kolkata’s urban slums", by Lorena Gibson, written in 2006.

"Poverty, Empowerment and Grass-roots Democracy" by Sita Venkateswar and Lorena Gibson, in the October 2006 issue of Graduate Women New Zealand (go to page 33).

"Beyond Four Walls", an essay by Amina Khatoon, teacher at Talimi Haq School, written in January 2006.

"Across the river", an essay written in early 1999 by Seema Tewari, a volunteer from Calcutta who helped to set up Talimi Haq School in 1998.

“Educational Scenario of Calcutta’s Urdu Speaking Community”, was written by Dr MKA Siddiqui, an eminent anthropologist, in 2005. This helps to put in perspective the larger context within which the work of Talimi Haq School may be seen.

Visitors in January 08

Thusnelda Mercy, a member of the dance troupe from Pina Bausch's Tanztheater Wuppertal, with Talimi Haq School teacher Binod.



Members of Pina Bausch's Tanztheater Wuppertal at Talimi Haq School. We were especially delighted to meet Shantala Shivalingappa, an Indian member of the group.



Carolyn Stephens, Susan and Earl Hyde and Brendan, all from UK.


Samar Borges, from Shanti International, UK, visited us.



Sita Venkateswar, anthropologist, Massey University, New Zealand, visited again.

Bamboo Blues

The staff and some children from Talimi Haq School saw the dress rehearsal yesterday of Bamboo Blues, a production inspired by India, performed by Pina Bausch's Tanztheater Wuppertal at the Rabindra Sadan in Calcutta.























It was spectacular and exquisite, an uplifting aesthetic experience.















See more pictures from the performance here.

Inspiration

After the performance, Pina Bausch and the members of her troupe interacted with the staff and children of Talimi Haq School, Howrah where they had visited during their research trip in 2006. Flower bouquets were presented to Pina and her colleagues.



I was moved to tears to see the warmth of the reception.







Pina and one of her colleagues said that they had tried to express in Bamboo Blues the feelings they experienced when they were at Talimi Haq School.





On behalf of the group, Pina Bausch presented Talimi Haq School with a set of signed catalogs of Tanztheater Wuppertal and a box of chocolates.

Pina Bausch production in Calcutta

Pablo Aran Gimeno, Ruth Amarante
Photo: © Ulli Weiss

Pina Bausch, the celebrated German dancer and choreographer, director of the Tanztheater Wuppertal, will be in in Calcutta with her troupe this month. She is one of the leading figures of modern dance.

Bamboo Blues, a dance theatre performance inspired by India, its cultural multiplicity and a research trip to India in November 2006, will be staged in the city on 18th and 19th January, at the Rabindra Sadan.

Pina (67) and her associates had visited the Talimi Haq School in late-2006, during their visit to Calcutta in preparation for their India-based production.

The piece was premiered in Germany in May 2007 without any name as the company's "new work." Apparently Bausch had decided on the "inspiring" title after a visit to Kyoto, Japan.

Here are some reviews of the performance:



‘The splendid soloists seem to be expressing those ambivalent emotions when their bodies move, fall, stretch and bend. They give themselves up to the momentum of the dance. To experience this is to be moved, to be carried out of the hall into another world.’

Melanie Suchy, ‘Dance theatre to the rhythm of the heart’, Die Zeit, 24 May 2007

‘The work of recent years essentially comprises happy memories of journeys; the rich associations, memories portrayed to perfection through dance are always a delight to watch. This piece too is a sequence of striking, powerful dances - mainly solos -and vividly staged perceptions of a different part of the world. Once more, Pina Bausch tells us much more than what can be rendered in a few lines’

Rolf Pfeiffer, ‘The weightlessness of India’s magic’, Westfälische Rundschau, 20 May 2007



‘The choreographic composition of contrasting moods in which elegies float on gusts, like the flowers released with balloons among the audience, attests to one’s own body language as a triumph of multi-layered expression.’

Dieter Stoll, ‘Indian dreams for the new piece by Pina Bausch’, Abendzeitung Nürnberg, 21 May 2007

‘The genuinely moving moments of the new evening: when a dancer appears out of the apparently enchanted forest that serves as a curtain, swings her arm, pauses for a second . . . and then describes her finely chiselled and passionate body art on the large stage which for minutes belongs just to her.’

Sylvia Staude, ‘A gentle Indian breeze—in Pina Bausch’s new, still untitled dance-theatre piece, Frankfurter Rundschau, 21 May 2007

The teachers and children of Talimi Haq School have been invited to attend the dress rehearsal of Bamboo Blues on 17 January.

Bravo!

Carolyn Stephens

Dr Carolyn Stephens, Senior Lecturer in International Environmental Health at the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine, will be in Calcutta in January 2008. Carolyn will be preparing a video documentary on Howrah Pilot Project and the Talimi Haq School.

Carolyn is an internationally recognised expert on urban public health policy. In 2007, Carolyn won a prestigious London Education Partnership Award in recognition of her groundbreaking work in engaging young people from deprived communities in East London with science. The awards are designed to honour those educational institutions and partnerships in London that have had the most impact in inspiring London students from disadvantaged backgrounds to believe that they can go to university and to succeed at doing so. At a national level, interest in science among the young is in decline, and trends indicate that disadvantaged young people are particularly affected, with few entering biomedical sciences.

With this in mind, Carolyn ran summer schools and offered work experience to disadvantaged young people in London in collaboration with science and education officers of London Borough of Barking and Dagenham. In 2004 she recruited a cohort of thirty one young people from three state schools in Barking and Dagenham, which is one of the most deprived areas of the capital. The pupils took part in a three-year project, entitled 'It's Our Science, Our Society, Our Health'. The aim was to encourage the young people to undertake their own science and research projects, to offer them support, and to inspire them to want to learn more.

The young people presented their findings at a reception hosted by the Royal Society in May 2007. The project topics they chose to work on had both local and international relevance, and ranged from the life cycle of malaria and other mosquito-related diseases, natural resistance to and protection from malaria, to connecting world-wide youth, the capability of young children's understanding, the history and usefulness of vaccines and triggers for asthma. The project has transformed the attitudes and aspirations of the young people who took part. In Carolyn's words, 'We all feel that higher education should be an option for all young people in London - irrespective of their social background. These young people changed our institution with their energy and enthusiasm, and their ideas on international health and poverty. We hope they go on with this work to transform the world we live in'.

For this work, Carolyn was also awarded the Royal Society Kohn Award for Excellence in Engaging the Public with Science, for 2007.

Among the students were Nelson and Iram, who visited Talimi Haq School in January 2007. And after his return, Nelson linked the Talimi Haq School to Shanti International, a UK-based charity. We are currently awaiting govt approval to receive a small grant from Shanti to support Talimi Haq School.

Carolyn had been the Environmental Health Adviser in the Calcutta Environmental Management Strategy and Action Plan (CEMSAP), a project of the Dept of Environment, Govt of West Bengal, supported by the DFID, UK. So she is quite familiar with Calcutta and Howrah. It was from CEMSAP that Howrah Pilot Project was initiated, and Carolyn had played an instrumental role in its establishment in 1997. Over the years, she has made valuable linkages for the resourcing of our grassroots programme in Priya Manna Basti. But she had been unable to be here in person, though her LSHTM and CEMSAP colleague Tony Fletcher had come in early 2000. Now Carolyn will finally be coming - to join in person what she has always been part of in mind and spirit. We are grateful to the Royal Society for enabling Carolyn to come back to Calcutta.