The festival of Dussehra comes in various other names throughout this part of the world, but the purpose is to celebrate the triumph of good over evil. It is a 10 day festival ... that also happens to coincide with the Bengali celebration of Durga Puja.
We happily were invited to events celebrating both this weekend, because of Allen's tabla playing friends.
On Friday night we saw a drum and dance performance coordinated by an adult community group to celebrate Dussehra, below is a slide show of some of the performances (Link to photos here). My favorite part of this experience, beside it being in a local auditorium (imagine a church community center) with loads of families watching, there was this one little girl who kept running to the front of the stage to dance along with the dancers. Adorable!
Obviously, Allen was most interested in the tabla players - but accompanying them was what we had originally thought was a xylophone, but turned out to be a man playing cups of water (video below)
09-25-2009 Drum Performance with cups of water, Lucknow from Nikki Candelore on Vimeo.
At first we thought they were using a xylophone in this drum performance for Dussehra in Lucknow ... but it turns out he was using cups of water.
On Saturday night we were invited to come see the performance of Shivargha, one of Allen's fellow tabla students perform at the Durga Puja festivities in Janta Park. The whole thing was pretty awesome, attached is a slideshow of some of the pictures I took. It totally wasn't what we had been expecting, although in honesty, I don't really know what any of us were expecting.
We were as much a spectical as the performances -- 12 gore (foriegners) showing up, some of the other language students came with us ... but really the whole thing was so big even we seemed to disappear into the crowd. They had this huge tent that had ceiling fans and chandeliers inside!
There were some more dance performances - this time by young children, again, very adorable. (Link to slideshow here)
Then Shiva came on, and he kicked some serious tabla-butt ... Allen tells me that Shiva is the best tabla player in Uttar Pradesh in the under 15 year old category, which is a pretty big deal. Here he is rocking out in the video below:
09-26-2009 Shivargha's tabla performance, Lucknow from Nikki Candelore on Vimeo.
At the Durga Puja at Janta Park in Lucknow
After all the merry-making, Shiva's father invited us all to his house for lunch to celebrate the Durga Puja with his family on Sunday ... we took him up on the offer, and I'll post pictures and stories in the next post.
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