51 | Q4 2021 Baithak UK is a not-for-profit company which promotes and celebrates the rich legacy of South Asian arts in the UK. In light of the company’s awards success, we spoke to company founder and director, writer, filmmaker and musician, Sangeeta Datta to learn more. To begin, please give us an overview of Baithak’s core values and mission. Our core values are to celebrate the best in arts, open dialogue about creative process, encourage younger talent to develop and create new work. Our goals are to strengthen the British-Asian arts sector and to respond to the world around us through creativity, to be accessible and diverse, to use the arts to highlight urgent global issues and benefit the less privileged. What kind of clients do you serve and how do you approach them? What is your unique selling point? A lot of our clients come to us after they have watched a Baithak production or by reference. We don’t really advertise widely, but the quality of our work and word of mouth reference has worked most for us. We also do many productions and projects with the help of Arts Council funding. Our USP is that we work closely with communities but also develop talent to professional levels. We make the arts accessible and have made possible many workshops/ masterclasses with leading talent in music, film, dance and literature. Many practising artists in the Brit-Asian sector have had their debuts on Baithak platforms. And we have taken our artists from community venues to the best venues like South Bank, Royal Albert Hall, British Museum, British Library, BFI and BAFTA. We have partnered with many arts organisations on national and international levels, such as in the project ANANT, the legendary poet Javed Akhtar from India translated Tagore songs, which were sung and played for by young British musicians. The project was developed organically through a series of workshops, and then toured in the UK and India. The music was published by ZEE Music. Cultural Legacy Arts NPO of the Year 2021 Are there any specific industry-based challenges or advantages you are facing? Two planned touring projects had to be called off because of the general uncertainty due to the COVID-19 pandemic. Also, all our live event plans had to be cancelled which stopped our income flow. We are a non-profit organisation but we still need funds to keep ourselves afloat. So, a lot of our energy was redirected to counselling and reaching out to young artists who were devastated by their loss of work. The advantage was that I very quickly thought about developing online and digital events. We developed the Connect Digital Festival and had about 80 artists participate in the Spring, Summer, and Monsoon edits with an astounding 60,000 viewers. We also started an exciting online conversation series called My Life, My Art in which visual artists, filmmakers and musicians speak about their work and the artistic process. This spring, I curated a high profile Spring Festival in India, and I also worked with an Indian rural theatre company to develop an adaptation of Shakespeare’s Macbeth which was then staged in the city of Calcutta. Do you have any plans for 2021 and beyond that you would like to share with our readers? We will be building on our digital concert Connect series, and also have plans to present some very exciting speakers on our conversation series, My Life, My Art starting this autumn. We have also just started talking about live events and tours which, fingers crossed, we can plan for summer and autumn 2022! Contact: Sangeeta Datta Email: sangeeta@baithakz.info Website: www.baithak.info Sep21709
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