Milapfest

Milapfest Milestones

Over the course of 30+ years, Milapfest has played an important role in shifting and adding to the artistic landscape of Britain which as effected thousands of audiences and artists from across the globe.

Here are some of the principal Milapfest productions / contributions that have become important milestones for the South Asian Arts sector a:

• Dance Yatra 2002: The groundbreaking dance event that presented over 300 dancers from all over Britain, to an excited audience of over 1500 people. The event presented school children, students and professionals together as never before,and showed off the rich variety of dance styles from India, from classical/traditional to folk and contemporary.

• Music for the Mind & Soul: Iconic monthly concert series with diverse musical experiences began regularly at the Barbirolli Room in Bridgewater Hall.

• Anand Yatra: the very popular Folk dance compilation with around 90 artistes premiered at the Lowry and was repeated twice.

• Sangeet Sabha: The National Conference for South Asian Music was held at the Bridgewater Hall in 2003; at the Lowry in 2004 and at the Peepul Centre in Leicester in 2005. This brought together everyone connected with South Asian Music and arts for the first time in an organised manner. Many new partnerships were born out of this conference.

• We created a regular, ongoing programme of Indian Music and Dance, along with workshops and other master classes around this visionary year round programme.

• The 1990s also marked a departure from the accepted practice so far: a South Asian arts organisation was making serious new relationships with major mainstream venues on an ongoing basis.

• Because of the strength of these partnerships, a number of major concerts were made possible for the first time in the Northwest: e.g. Ravi Shanker, Anoushka Shanker, Ustad Vilayat Khan, L Subramaniam, Abida Parween, Nitin Sawhney amongst others.