Rajasthan, India · rajasthani folk · world

The Manganiyar Seduction

1 upcoming festival

Roysten Abel's staged spectacle: dozens of Manganiyar folk musicians stacked in a wall of lit red boxes, building Sufi songs into an avalanche. A theatrical one-off on any festival bill.

The Manganiyar are a hereditary community of Muslim musicians from western Rajasthan, playing khartal, dholak, sarangi, harmonium and morchang at the weddings and gatherings of their long-standing patron families. The Indian theatre director Roysten Abel put them inside a set of stacked cubicles, each with its own red curtain and bulb, an arrangement he took from the window displays of Amsterdam's red light district.

The staging does the arranging. A single voice starts in one lit box, another light comes up, then another, until the whole grid is playing and the rows of bulbs are flashing in time. A conductor works the front of the stage in full view, cueing entrances and pulling the tempo up. Abel has toured the piece internationally since the mid-2000s.

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