Mysuru: “Rang”, a one-of-its-kind art and music festival showcasing artworks and performances, was recently organised at Bram’s Woodcrafting Studio, Hebbal Industrial Area in city.

The festival hosted dance and live-music performances by select artistes along with visual arts like photography and wood-inlay. The organisers of the festival brought their vision to reality by putting together art forms which are not genre specific and were open to people of all ages.

The festival began with multi-instrumentalist, Ash Prad’s rendition of Hindustani Raag, ‘Miyan ki Todi’, on his Mohan Veena, which hypnotised the crowd and brought them close to the stage. This was followed by a contemporary dance performance by Aneesha Warrier, a trained dancer in Bharatanatyam, Hip-Hop and Contemporary, who expressed her life-story on the stage, through the medium of dance.

The stage was then passed on to Rahul Jha, a multi-genre musician, who made the crowd sway with a fusion of Western and Indian classical music and contemporary ghazals. Singer Livia Thomas came up next who took the crowd through a sinusoidal wave of emotions and left them on a cheerful note.

The first half of the show was brought to closure by a Bharatanatyam dance performance by Meera Mohan, depicting an interaction between infant Rama and his mother which was much appreciated by the audience.

During the interval, the audience savoured on the snacks and surveyed the Visual Art Zone where photographers Sumukh Bharadwaj and Gautam Doshi had displayed a myriad of photographs in the medium of postcards, calendars and frames for sale. Wood- inlay art installations by Bhanuprakash Ramlingaswamy (founder of CraftMelon) caught a lot of attention among the art-lovers. Each one of them had a story to tell and memories to share about their pieces.

The second half of the show began with singer Anusha Kulkarni who brought out the regional renditions, by singing Kannada and Tamil songs. She was followed by singer Apoorv Rale, a passionate follower of art and music, who sang some heart-touching and thought-mongering songs.

This was followed by Darshana Borkotoky, a trained dancer in many genres, performed next, showcasing a Bharatanatyam performance preluding a Jazz/Kathak dance performance. She kept the crowd anticipating for more.

The stage was taken over by Hamilton Jayasekaran, a self-taught church musician, who mesmerised the crowd with his fingers on the keys.

The last of the line-up was a fusion ensemble of Mohan Veena, Cajon, Guitar and Tabla by Ash Prad, Pranav Chitrabhanu, Pankaj Borthakur and Arpit Singh, who played an own composition called “Life is but a Journey.” They took the audience through a stream of emotions, through highs and lows, through different colours and brought the line-up to a closure.

As is the tradition of “Rang,” where the stage is open for the audience to express with freedom, an open mic session which lasted for about half-an-hour witnessed some Kannada, Hindi and English songs sung by pre-registered folks from the audience.

“Rang” is an idea, a place, where creative expression is everything, is everywhere; where the audience connects with the artists in person and conversations flow freely and true synergy can be witnessed between the art, the artist and the audience.

Rang’s founders are college friends Arpit Singh, Pankaj Borthakur and Spoorthi Krishna. Being artistes themselves, the team conceptualised this from their own art varieties.

They envisioned a platform where multi-genre art forms and performances would be showcased for an art-loving audience in an intimate setup. Later Ritika Raj joined the team to get the operational aspects up and going.

The main editions of “Rang” are envisioned to be organised in different cities, with multiple Rang express editions being organised in Bengaluru and Mysuru, the cultural capital of Karnataka.