ALEXANDRA MARVAR
Mumbai, Calcutta, Santiniketan
MARCH 2014
In March 2014, when it was very very very hot in India, I traveled to India with an American violinist named Jenavieve who wanted to shoot pilot material for a show she conceived about musical collaborations across cultures. We traveled to three cities together and I shot footage of her playing with different Indian musicians in a variety of often-totally-unusual situations — unusual, at least, for a violinist based in New York.
We traveled to Calcutta to find local musicians Malabika Brahma and Sanjay Khyapa. On arrival, they invited us up to a quiet university town north of Calcutta called Santiniketan.
There, we dropped in on Sanjay's (rather informal) music school. Kids traveled from all over the area to learn guitar from Sanjay while sitting on mats on the forest floor.