Estonian duo Puuluup and Sapphire Creations Dance Company collaborated for a special t2 shoot ahead of the band’s maiden performance in Calcutta along with the SappTop Series Season 2, supported by Caring Minds and Sangeet Natak Akademi on October 2. Sapphire dancers, their creative director Sudarshan Chakravarty, along with dancers of Sapphire Promita Karfa, Alenka Mullick, Anurag Gupta, Sahini Chowdhury, Bijoy Sharma, Abrar Saqib and Rathin Das, and the Estonian duo Ramo Teder and Marko Veisson donned Bobo Calcutta’s pieces from the collection The Dawn of Bloom. They posed in the lush green backdrop of Vedic Village Spa Resort and upheld what can be called a blending of two cultures where boundaries and differences fizzle out. The Sapphire dancers are known for their top-notch and articulate contemporary dance pieces and Puuluup for being the masters of humour and re-inventors of the Estonian traditional instrument — the talharpa. When the two blended, what it created was a kaleidoscope of colours.
The Estonian duo pose in their classic tuxedos
The Dawn of Bloom collection, Bobo Calcutta's second wedding line, amalgamates mythology and sexuality with pieces celebrating art, culture and craftsmanship. A collage of Bobo’s art over the last five years, the pieces have been made with techniques like hand embroidery and digital printing on fabrics like cotton, silk and muslin and driven with motifs of hybrid tigers and blackbucks against the backdrop of surreal forest floors. The one-eyed daisy drizzled on the forest floor blurs the lines between reality and fantasy. Vivid colours and eccentricity of the prints and design pay homage to “Mad Love”.
“For me, Puuluup with their new Zombie post-folk genre kind of gave me a direct reference point to their music, which is crazy and abstract and complements the ethos of the brand’s clothes. Both have roots in tradition, which offshoots in a neo-contemporary form becoming an independent identity by itself. Bobo stands for representation of age, generation and craft as something contemporary. He’s breathed it into his clothes, giving it a new context, making it modern but not totally disconnected from his roots,” said Sudarshan.
“In dreams we dwell/ In dreams we live/ In dreams we love/ In dreams we survive/ In dreams we had lost/ In dreams we rise / Most importantly it is a dream/ So let us not understand or understand it/ Because let the dream be a dream/ It is the dream,” expressed Bobo through poetry.
Check out a t2 album of Sapphire dancers and Puuluup at Vedic Village Spa Resort amidst the serenity of nature:
Puuluup and Sudarshan
The dancers of Sapphire in Bobo Calcutta kaftans, A-line and parallel pants with vibrant prints and shirts strike a pose in front of a temple, depicting how movements of the body and postures can create a concrete structure. They created the geometric figure of the temple.
The Sapphire dancers create a breezy structure at Gumti in Vedic Village. The dancers slipped into Bobo Calcutta denim and cut-out embroidered pants to show the transition and interplay of a modern digital print and the traditional age-old embroidery.
A chat with Puuluup:
How was this duo started?
We both are specialists in the Estonian instrument talharpa and we met each other at a camp for this instrument. We gradually developed an attitude that was a common factor between us, we wanted to play originals with this instrument, make something new and unique, break barriers of our traditions and our own written songs, structures and so on and so forth. So that’s why we decided to team up and do it together.
Are all your pieces improvisations or composed before?
Most of the songs are composed and structured from before. But there are a few tracks that have room for improvisation as well. Our lyrics are abstract. A lot of it is actually improvisation because it has no meaning in any specific language (laughs) and another part of the lyrics is Estonian, Spanish, Russian or English. Largely, we use Estonian. We’ve conceived the structure before and we keep room for improvisational interaction with the audience, so that alters and transforms the entire presentation. Our live performances are largely dependent on how the audience is responding to our quips, stories, humour and music. There are workshops sometimes, we talk about looping and music (smiles).
Sapphire dancers jammed with Puuluup as a part of their SappTop Series Season 2, conceptualised to bring their rooftop rehearsal pad to the performance space
How do you deviate from the traditions?
These are our songs and tunes, that we sit down and make it together. We do have short references from traditional pieces. These instruments are replicas of traditional instruments that were played 150 years ago, but with these talharpas that we use, there are some nuances and technical aspects that amplify the sounds.
Your videos are very unique. What’s the story behind it?
For recording Dear Birch Trees, we recorded the video in a birch forest, something common in Estonia. So we do try to focus on the lyrics and how it’s touching us. There’s a team who are currently touring with us to make a documentary on our tour and journey, so those guys are to be credited for our video. As previously, we’ve focused on audio releases of our number.
You incorporate humour into your expressions and presentation. What inspired you?
Life experiences (laughs). It’s a combination of thoughts and ideas. The elocutions and what happens in the video are made by the director. It’s been inspired by our songs as well. We gather experiences from Estonia and breathe them into our tracks. Like we have composed a song on a very popular sport of cross-country skiing in Estonia. The name Puuluup is named after a tree called “puu” in Estonia and “luup” comes from the looper that we use to play the talharpa.
We try to present our songs lightly and don’t have a precise meaning. When we perform, it’s open for everybody to have their own interpretations and feelings. We have a love song about the wind turbine, which is losing its essence in Estonia. The dark humour we use is for the sheer pleasure of our listeners. We’d love to sing only about sports but traditions of folk music demand we bring up rural issues, so we also incorporate topics of Estonian agriculture, like herding sheep, and making hay, among a host of other stuff into our songs (smiles).
How was the India tour?
It is a professional challenge to see audiences with a different experience, and how they’ll react to the songs and speeches. How they perceive us! It depends not only on the country but also on the venue, whether a theatre, an open stadium, or a spa like today, (laughs). It was a great privilege to travel to other countries and learn from the musicians of this country and get inspired.
What do you both like about working with each other?
We don’t like each other, we’re just business partners (both burst out laughing). Jokes apart, we connect in our opinions, our choice of music, political ideology and other things. So working together is really fun!
Costume: Bobo Calcutta