On Sunday night at the Brighton Dome, Anoushka Shankar garnered whoops, cheers and a well-deserved standing ovation as she rounded off her Brighton Festival with the UK premiere of music from her new EP, Chapter III: We Return to Light. The beloved sitar virtuoso had lost her voice following illness and enthusiastic participation in a collective scream during Brown Girl in the Ring at the start of the Festival (I was there, it was amazing). But through her instrument and her band, she eloquently articulated a powerful expression of personal and collective hope and healing.
Chapter III is the third of a trilogy of mini-albums, starting in Chapter I with the transient joy of a summer afternoon, heading into womb-like, healing night with Chapter II (subtitle: How Dark It is Before the Dawn) and now, with Chapter III, returning to the golden heat of the morning – ‘a time of strength, wisdom, and change’. Anoushka explained, through words read out by members of her band, that this cycle was an allegory for how we move through difficulty, personally and collectively. The creative journey of the trilogy had started in a time of personal trouble and the realisation that “there is only ever this moment”.
And the music somehow embodied this duality – of the narrative of a journey into light, with at the same time ‘the moment’ reigning supreme. Motifs repeated and looped, like so many stitches of wool stealthily accumulating into fabric.
Anoushka began alone on stage, a solitary figure with a sitar, before she was joined by Tom Farmer on double bass, Sarathy Korwar on percussion and Arun Ghosh on clarinet – pioneers and innovators in their own right. An enraptured audience was led from contemplative reflectiveness through intense frenzied heat, ending on the celebratory and hopeful sounds of Amrita and We Return to Love. The sound of the sitar fluttered and swooped exquisitely against the densely woven backdrop.
Chapter III’s theme of returning to the light of morning after night is what inspired Anoushka’s choice of the theme for Brighton Festival: New Dawn. To have lived this theme of a New Dawn together, as the collective of people involved in and touched by the Brighton Festival, has been a deeply powerful communal exercise in courage and hope.
This is the first year that I’ve attended anything at the Brighton Festival – I’d always been aware of it, as the weighty sun at the centre of the city’s festival season, but like the sun, had never looked at it directly. But when I discovered that Anoushka Shankar was curating this year’s Festival, and saw lists of Indian names on posters, as someone who belongs to both the UK and India, I had to dip my toe in. And God, it’s been glorious.
A young professional from Chennai sitting near me on Sunday said “it’s like it was created for me in a way, I was missing a taste of home.” And it has felt like that for so many of us – just entering spaces featuring the broad diversity of the Indian diaspora, of all ages and all cultural tastes, in kurtas and dresses and jeans, with Indian accents and myriad regional British ones – has been a thrill.
Brighton Festival has been a taste of a better future and proof that it’s possible. Thank you, Anoushka Shankar. A New Dawn that’s passionate, courageous and led by South Asian women? Sign me up.
Brighton Festival: Website
