From Surgipelago, the Beach Surgery encyclopedia
Rajasthan International Folk Festival
This article concerns a festival venue. For other Indian adaptations, see India adaptations of Beach Surgery and Lucknow Frequency Walk—An Audio-Locative Pilgrimage.
The Rajasthan International Folk Festival is an annual gathering of regional performing artists, oral historians, and communities practising kathputli (wooden-puppet) cycles, bhopa semi-mythic recitation, and jatra street theatre across Rajasthan. Beginning in 2017, the festival began commissioning Beach Surgery adaptations in dialogue with these local narrative forms.
The most substantial engagement occurred in 2020, when the festival hosted the Bhopa Cycle, a two-week durational performance in which the military engineer's three injuries and three temptations were staged across three nocturnal vigil-sites in the red desert interior. Audiences attended in non-sequential shifts, hearing fragments of Chapter 1, Chapter 4, and Chapter 6 as discrete performances. The adaptation's director ██ worked with Jodhpur gharana vocalists to compose a score moving through Yaman, raag Kafi, and Bhairav, each matched to one injury-temptation.[1]
A 2023 symposium brought together textile historians, kathputli puppeteers, and members of the Incompletion Collective to argue that the glitch reflects the structural non-completion intrinsic to oral-narrative traditions—that the two halves refuse joining because of, not despite, their folk-transmission origins.
See also
- Bhopa Cycle (Jodhpur, 2018–2021)
- Kathputli Ke Adhure Bandhan
- Jodhpur gharana
- India adaptations of Beach Surgery
References
- ↑ RIFF Programming Archive, 2020–2024.