Close to the India - Myanmar border is the village of Phek in Nagaland. Around 5000 people live here, almost all of whom cultivate rice for their own consumption. As they work in cooperative groups, the rice cultivators of Phek sing. The seasons change, and so does the music, transforming the mundane into the hypnotic. The love that they sing of is also a metaphor for the need for the other - the friend, the family, the community, to build a polyphony of voices.
Anushka Meenakshi has worked as a filmmaker and a community video trainer. Iswar Srikumar is an actor and a lighting /sound designer for theatre. Iswar and Anushka are both members of Perch, a performance collective in Chennai made up of artists from various disciplines. In 2011, they started the u-ra-mi-li project (the song of our people), which focuses on stories about music in the everyday, through writing, photograph, performance and film. The u-ra-mi-li project has received support for its work from the India Foundation for the Arts, pad.ma, the Archive and Research Centre for Ethnomusicology and has been selected for the NFDC Film Bazaar WIP Lab (2014) and Docedge Kolkata (2015). They have been commissioned by the National Centre for Performing Arts (Mumbai), Puthu Yugam, National Museum of Denmark, Human Factors International and the Pune Biennale 2017 and exhibited work at the National Gallery of Modern Art (Mumbai) and the Bunkier Sztuki Gallery of Contemporary Art, among others.
Anushka Meenakshi has worked as a filmmaker and a community video trainer. Iswar Srikumar is an actor and a lighting /sound designer for theatre. Iswar and Anushka are both members of Perch, a performance collective in Chennai made up of artists from various disciplines. In 2011, they started the u-ra-mi-li project (the song of our people), which focuses on stories about music in the everyday, through writing, photograph, performance and film. The u-ra-mi-li project has received support for its work from the India Foundation for the Arts, pad.ma, the Archive and Research Centre for Ethnomusicology and has been selected for the NFDC Film Bazaar WIP Lab (2014) and Docedge Kolkata (2015). They have been commissioned by the National Centre for Performing Arts (Mumbai), Puthu Yugam, National Museum of Denmark, Human Factors International and the Pune Biennale 2017 and exhibited work at the National Gallery of Modern Art (Mumbai) and the Bunkier Sztuki Gallery of Contemporary Art, among others.