Talacchanda Exhibition and Education Project 2002-03

Talacchanda was a wide ranging, multi-disciplinary, international project, based on themes from ancient Indian theatre. The visual art and dance collaboration between Ranjana Thapalyal and Bharata Natyam dancer Anjana Rajan detailed on this website in the exhibitions section, opened at the British Council Queens Gallery in 2000, was re-imagined for Out of the Blue, Edinburgh in 2001, and then for the Tramway, Glasgow in 2002.

At Tramway the exhibition was paralleled by an extensive education and outreach programme with taylored workshops for a broad range of participants. These included community groups such as the Pollokshields Writers Group, dance students of the Scottish Academy of Asian Arts, Scottish Ballet Youth and Integrated Companies, as well as Further and Higher Education institutions, and primary and secondary schools.

Aiming to to act as a catalyst for inter-cultural collaborative links and fresh thinking on anti-racist education, unique talks and workshops were spaced out prior to and beyond the exhibition, over a period of nearly eighteen months across Glasgow, with Anjana also taking dance workshops to Leeds and wider Yorkshire schools. Coinciding with the University of Strathclyde conference Gender, Culture, Power devised by Eileen Yeo, the Talacchanda exhibition was incroprated into the conference programme and a paper given by Ranjana. At Glasgow School of Art, in the run up to the exhibition students from the Art and Design in Education programme were introduced to postcolonial theory and invited to inform their classroom based projects and methods with such awareness. Further, Talacchanda was incorporated into GSA’s first year fine art brief on the body; its pedagoic underpinnings facilitated a staff study day on inter-cultural and anti-racist strategies for art education led by Paul Dash, and was central to the formulation and programming of annual study days of the history and theory department of the school in 2002 and 2003.