The festivities have already begun
Milap is celebrating four decades(Image: Photo courtesy of Milap)
A 15-day festival has already started to take over the city, coinciding with a huge milestone. INDIKA, Milap’s festival of Indian arts, has officially returned, taking place across the Liverpool City Region and bringing the best of Indian arts to an even wider audience.
Marking Milap’s 40th anniversary, INDIKA will feature a programme of traditional contemporary pieces to yoga, poetry, storytelling and activities for all ages. Events which began on October 17, are taking place in venues such as The Tung Auditorium, Liverpool Philharmonic Music Room, Future Yard, The Everyman.
With Diwali falling on October 20, Milap’s Diwali celebrations will feature as a centrepiece of this year’s INDIKA. Established in 1985, with a shared vision of bringing people together with a common love for Indian arts, Milap have brought some of India’s most revered musicians and performers to stages across Liverpool and throughout the UK.
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Alok Nayak, artistic director of Milap, the UK’s leading Indian Arts & Culture company, told the Liverpool ECHO: “Milap was founded for people. It was first for people of Indian origin who were born and brought up in Liverpool, that’s people like me.
“It was for people like us to connect with our culture, with our parents who came from India, moved here, and we wanted to learn and connect with our cultural roots. But also very importantly, it was for us to then be able to share our culture with people of all other backgrounds so that we could connect and bring people together.
Milap was founded in Liverpool in 1985(Image: Photo courtesy of Milap)
“Then it developed more into a performing arts festival, so it became about sharing and putting on public performances for people of all backgrounds.. In the early days, our founders were able to attract some really amazing artists from India and around the world.
“One of the ideas behind Milap was to bring Indian art to Liverpool where it was normally only seen in London. When I was growing up, Milap was kind of all around us and available.
“I grew up listening to a lot of music and watching a lot of dance performances. As I was growing up, and then in university, I volunteered for Milap as well.
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“I think a lot of Indians who’ve grown and lived in Liverpool have had some connection with Milap. But it’s so much more than just for Indian people – it’s really a festival and an organisation for anyone.” In the early days of Milap, the team built strong partnerships with venues around the city, from the Bluecoat to Philharmonic Hall, St George’s Hall and more.
Over the last 40 years, Alok, 47, said generations have come to know Milap and attend their many events. He said: “We have audience members from Liverpool who have followed us literally from the 80s and 90s.
It has hosted numerous events throughout the decades(Image: Photo courtesy of Milap)
“They’re still attending performances today and a lot of them are not Indian or not even South Asian. I think that’s been one of the big strengths of Milap – that we’ve been able to create an audience of followers who love Indian music, love Indian dance, and they don’t even have any Indian heritage.
“There’s a lot of work we do which is national or international, but it only happens in Liverpool. There are some festival performances, some premieres that have taken place for the first time in Liverpool.
To coincide with their celebrations, their popular festival INDIKA has returned(Image: Photo courtesy of Milap)
“We support young artists and help them become professionals. There are a lot of artists who’ve been trained in Liverpool by us and they’ve got they’ve been on summer residencies, they’ve been on training programmes and they’ve gone on to become professionals and they perform around the world.”
Coinciding with their 40th celebrations, biennial festival INDIKA has returned this month, hosting over 20 different events from October 17, with more than 40 artists coming to the city. Alok said the team are working with 10 different venues to make the festival “bigger, brighter and more diverse than ever before”.
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He said: “Indian arts and culture are for anyone – so even if you don’t understand or don’t know the language or you haven’t heard it before, it’s easy to get into it because it has rhythms, improvisation, compositions that anyone can connect with. I think we’re in one of the best places in the world where we could be to do that because Liverpool is so warm and open.
“It’s got such a sharing, welcoming spirit. We have done things here which don’t happen anywhere else in the world – and that’s pretty exciting.
It has welcomed generations(Image: Photo courtesy of Milap)
“I think we’re also taking risks with different things. We could do it in India or London or Manchester or somewhere like that, but we also want to do it here because this is where we’re from and we want to make sure that people of Liverpool are able to do it but also that we produce work that goes from Liverpool to other parts of the world too.”
To find out more about Milap and INDIKA, click here. You can also find out more on the ECHO website here.