Chitrakari

Music: Sándor Fekete Kiss

Sets: Nikoletta Domak

Choreographed by: Shyamala Surendran, Panni Somi

Directed by: Panni Somi

The piece entitled Chitrakari (the painter) was inspired by the works of Elisabeth Brunner (Brunner Erzsébet), an Indian painter of Hungarian origin. By setting up an ephemereal memorial these images salute her long and fertile artistic cereer. Elisabeth Brunner’s paintings come to life with the help of dance, and tell the story of the moment their painter captured. 

Erzsébet Brunner (1910-2001) and her mother – renowned figures of the Hungarian mystical painting tradition – arrived in India in 1930, where they immediately immersed themselves in the hustle and bustle of contemporary modern Indian art and intellectual life. Music, dance, literature and fine arts, ancient and contemporary all found their place in this teeming cultural medium symbolising the extraordinary Indian force which honours and safeguards every tradition and accepts and assimilates new ones, making them characteristically ’Indian’. This is how the Hungarian Erzsébet Brunner was able to become a recognised Indian painter.