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| Reviews |
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| examiner.com |
| October 21, 2013 |
| Indo-American Arts Council celebrates 15th anniv gala with Paul Williams |
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| When the Indo-American Arts Council (IAAC) launched 15 years ago, "there was no sign of Indian arts," says the New York non-profit arts organization's executive director Aroon Shivdasani. |
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| "We've got such talented artists, but Indian-Americans could go to the theater, opera, art galleries and movies without seeing Indian artists anywhere!" she notes. |
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| But on Nov. 21, the IAAC will hold its 15th anniversary gala at the Angel Oresanz Foundation for the Performing Arts on Manhattan’s Lower East Side, with legendary singer-songwriter Paul Williams and jazz pianist/composer Kenny Ascher (the pair co-wrote the Oscar-nominated “Rainbow Connection” fromThe Muppet Movie) performing in honor of author Salman Rushdie, filmmaker Mira Nair and Dr. Manjula Bansal, who are being honored for their contribution to the global artistic community. |
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| Actor/comedian Aasif Mandvi of The Daily Show With Jon Stewart fame will emcee the event, which will also include a fashion show featuring the work of Indian designer Manish Arora. Actress and culinary expert Madhur Jaffrey will also participate. |
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| The IAAC gala will commemorate 15 years of educating and exposing audiences to literary, performing, visual and folk arts from the Indian subcontinent. |
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| The secular, non-profit, volunteer-driven arts organization is the first and only Indian arts council in the U.S. representing all of the artistic disciplines, including theater, dance, music, film, folk arts and literature; it staged the first annual Indian theater, film, dance and playwright festivals in the country, as well as an annual traveling exhibition of contemporary Indian art. |
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| “It’s exciting that we made it to 15!” says Shivdasani, one of three IAAC co-founders. “It’s been quite an uphill ride, but now we’re seeing a bit of the fruits. Look around everywhere: There’s Indian-inspired clothes, and Indian food has become second nature. You see Neil Patel’s stage settings in the theater, musicians like Vijay Iyer and lots of actors like Aasif Mandvi, Maulik Pancholy on30 Rock, Sarita Chaudhry on Homeland and Sakina Jaffrey in House Of Cards. And our directors like Deepa Mehta and Mira Nair are out there, too.” |
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| Additionally, continues Shivdasani, “our artists are shown at Sotheby’s and Christie’s and galleries all over, and are actually being acknowledged that they exist, have talent and are appreciated.” |
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| She recalls staging the first IAAC Festival of Indian Theatre in New York in 2000. |
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| “We honored three of India’s greatest playwrights--Vijay Tendulkar, Girish Karnad and Mahesh Dattani, and afterward seven young Indian thespians came up to me and said, ‘You brought them here, but no one knows we exist!’ So we did a playwrights festival to encourage young Indian playwrights to write for Indian-American actors and directors and audiences.” |
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| As for literature, Shivdasani points to the obvious Salman Rushdie, then notes how “many younger writers couldn’t get a foothold.” But “gradually,” she adds, people are realizing that Indians are “as valid as any others” in the arts. |
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| “People know us as doctors, academics, leaders in science and IT (information technology), and on the other end as taxi drivers and newspaper vendors,” she says, “but nobody knew about our arts. So we presented the first Indian film festival of films of and about India—now called the New York Indian Film Festival—as well as theater festivals, dance festivals and traveling art exhibitions that go around the country to build awareness of our arts and artists, so that mainstream America can know we exist and appreciate us.” |
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| Names like Indian film directors Mani Ratnam and Aparna Sen, Shivdasani says, deserve to be as recognizable to American filmgoers as classic Apu Trilogyfilmmaker Satyajit Ray, who along with Ravi Shankar is among the few Indian artists whose names are well-known in the U.S. |
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| “This is a country of immigrants,” she says. “We should be part and parcel of the landscape—not this exotic thing that you forget.” |
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| The upcoming IAAC gala honors “three outstanding Indian-Americans,” says Shivdasani. Both Rushdie and Nair have been major supporters of the organization since the beginning; Dr. Bansal is chief of clinical pathology at The Hospital for Special Surgery in Manhattan and also a longtime IAAC supporter. |
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| “It’s going to be a wonderful, fun night,” says Shivdasani, who approached Williams to provide the entertainment after meeting him through author/filmmaker Tracey Jackson, his book and blogging collaborator whose documentary Lucky Ducks, part of which takes place in Mumbai, premiered at the 2009 IAAC Film Festival, then known as the Mhindra Indo-American Arts Council (MIAAC) Film Festival. |
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| “I knew all his music!” says Shivdasani, who grew up steeped in the arts and cites Elvis Presley and The Beatles as her favorite musicians. “Every Indian knows four languages, and we all grew up with English as our first language. So I knew all his songs, and when we were planning this event in June and needed a big name in the West, I emailed him to see if he would perform.” |
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| But there was “one huge fly in the ointment,” notes Shivdasani: “No money!” |
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| Yet not only was that no obstacle for Williams, he generously decided to bring along Ascher. |
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| “It may be surprising to find Kenny and I performing at an Indian gala, but it just goes to prove that music is universal and does not discriminate by race, ethnicity, or socio-economic status,” says Williams. |
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| Looking past the gala, Shivdasani is readying her 14th Annual New York Indian Film Festival, slated for May 5-10, 2014. |
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| "The gala gives us a bit of a cushion,” she says, referring to operating funds raised via the event. And she notes that even though the IAAC is an arts council, it also provides assistance in response to disasters in India. |
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| “We raised tsunami relief money [in 2004] from an art auction at Christie’s, and when the earthquakes struck [Indian states] Maharashtra and Gujarat last year, we put up a play at the U.N. to raise money,” she says. The IAAC also responded to the 2002 communal violence in Gujarat. |
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| “We’re all from the same part of the world,” she explains. “I got a playwright friend to take [author and Indian Minister of State for Human Resource Development—and former U.N. official] Shashi Tharoor’s novel Riot and adapt it into a dramatic reading featuring [Indian actresses] Shabana Azmi and Madhur Jaffrey and roles representing extremist Hindi, Muslim and Sikh—and the ‘voice of reason.’ So there could be no polarization.” |
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| She notes, too, that the first IAAC Film Festival took place after 9-11. |
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| “When we were growing up my mother, who was an English and drama professor and a phenomenal singer, used to say that you aren’t a complete person unless you know all the arts,” says Shivdasani, hailing her late mother as her inspiration. |
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| “So we always react through the arts,” she concludes. “The arts reflect life, and life seems a lot of times to be like food for the arts. They go hand-in-hand.” |
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| URL: http://www.examiner.com/article/indo-american-arts-council-celebrates-15th-anniv-gala-with-paul-williams |
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