BOSTON: The Sub-continental Drift (SubDrift), organized their amazing monthly “open mics” program on Friday, Jul 15 at Danger!Awesome, Cambridge to showcase the basement talents by South Asian Americans.
This event brought two featured artists to audience, namely Ganavya Doraiswamy (vocalist) and Rajna Swaminathan (Mrudangam). Both are accomplished artists in the field of South Indian classical music presented wonderful performance. Neel Agrawal is a multi- percussionist who incorporates various styles of world music including fusion, Indian and Western classical, world music, jazz, rock, and theatre into his own unique style.
He offered a brilliant performance of drumming and also showed how the basic compositions of Tabla lessons are built and variations are created to the audience. He also encouraged audience to play with him with their hands. Several new and old open mic performers also exhibited their hidden talents and creativity by singing, reading poetry and playing various Indian, Egyptian, and Western instruments in an amazing way.
The first SubDrift open mic series started in Washington, DC in 2007 and the concept has spread to New York, Chicago, San Francisco and Boston. In Boston it started in August 2012 and is a part of the national movement that came up to build and sustain creative community amongst local South Asians, and the very name Subcontinental Drift reflects the hybrid identities the Desis inherit in America between different cultural and geographic spaces.
The organizing committee of SubDrift thanked the owner of Danger! Awesome for letting them to use their workplace and the whole community at EMW Bookstore for their incredible support and partnership over the years. SubDrift embraces everyone and enunciates enthusiastically, “No matter what is your background, or what is your experience level as a performer, there is a stage for you at SubDrift,” say organizers.
An incredible Friday night with talented open mic performers had the support from AdiNochur, Michael Dwan Singh, Sapan Modi , Shilpa Srivastava and Simone Labbance.
GeethaPatil
