Tagore project: The Fatal Hunt (Kalmrigaya)

EFDSS partnered with the Foundation for Indian Performing Arts (FIPA) in their cross-cultural performance and participatory project based on Rabindranath Tagore’s dance-opera The Fatal Hunt (Kalmrigaya, 1882), in which he adapted and drew on British theatrical, operatic and musical forms into Bengali and Indian classical music to tell a tale from the Ramayana.

Rabindranath Tagore (1861 – 1941) is one of the Sub Continent’s most famous cultural icons. He was a poet, writer, artist, playwright, composer and campaigner for social change in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. He was the winner of the Nobel Prize for Literature 1913 and two of his compositions are now the national anthems of India and Bangladesh. Tagore spent part of his education in England where he came in contact with the myriad tunes of the English, Irish, Scottish country music, old Ballads and Victorian parlour songs which he reinvented into his own work.

At the project launch event, at Cecil Sharp House on 11th November 2009, Cecil Sharp House Community Choir sang an arrangement of ‘Ye Banks and Braes’ - one of the six British songs adapted by Tagore in The Fatal Hunt - prior to the FIPA performing their contemporary edited version of the dance-opera for an invited audience, including members of the South Asian community in Britain who have worked with the FIPA to learn and record Tagore’s original songs in Bengali. A DVD of the production, recordings of the music and other project documentation will be given to the archive of the Vaughan Williams Memorial Library.