Bhoomija’s Sunny Symphony celebrates inclusivity in music

Bhoomija Jackfruit Festival’s inaugural concerts featured special children

Sunny Symphony, presented by the children of Srishti Special Academy, Bengaluru and directed by versatile artiste MD Pallavi, was an ode to the connection a concert could bring when not confined to conventional performance parameters.

This was the inaugural concert of the Bhoomija Jackfruit Festival, curated by eminent musicians Shubha Mudgal and Aneesh Pradhan. Pallavi also hosted the show with a warmth that seemed to embrace the children on stage and among the audience.

The show was about showcasing how evocative music could be when singers are given the space to forge their own relationship with a song. The decision of the festival programmers to centre stage musical journeys rather than outcomes helped this.

Gayathri Krishna, founder and managing trustee, Bhoomija Trust, credits this quality of the concert to Pallavi. She put together the songs and brought in singers Prathima Bhat and Meghana Bhat, who trained Srishti’s children for eight weeks at its campus on Bengaluru’s outskirts.

“Last year’s Jackfruit Festival was inaugurated with Pallavi singing for Srishti’s children. The children enjoyed it immensely,” Gayathri recalls. As a step forward, the festival team wondered if they could reverse the audience-performer equation this year by bringing the children on stage.

“This also met the Academy’s goals towards inclusion, and the concert and the process impacted the singers and students,” says Gayathri.

The show featured songs by popular composers and poets, and these were chosen for the “curiosity and wonder” they inspired, says Pallavi. The focus was to choose songs that were simple, relatable and mostly known to the children. And so, the singers made the song their own – even pronouncing some words with heightened clarity and emotion, leading to a moving listening experience.