And 5-6-7-8: Performance Time at Shanti Bhavan!

It’s now July (is it really, already??) and my sister Summer is here! She’ll be here teaching at Shanti Bhavan for six weeks. She brought a ¾-size cello to donate to the school to go with the regular-sized cello she donated last summer. However, that original cello was a near disaster. When I first arrived in June, Summer had me email her an update on that cello…when I found it in the music room, there were no strings on it, the bridge was nowhere to be found, and when I picked it up to see if the sound post was still standing (on the inside of the cello), I heard something rattling around – the sound post was most definitely NOT still in place. So Summer met with a luthier in New York City who gave her a lesson in re-setting a sound post in a cello and loaned her the tools to use.

The day after she arrived here in India, we brought the cello into our room, laid it out on a table and basically did some major surgery on it. I held the flashlight through one of the F-holes while she stuck the “sound post grabber” in through the other F-hole – it took a couple of tries to get the sound post standing again, but in about 30 minutes, the cello was playable! The sound post and bridge were back in place, new strings were strung up and tuned. Pretty crazy.

The crazier thing was that we had no idea that within a few days that cello would be a part of a concert in celebration of “School Day” – the anniversary of the founding of Shanti Bhavan. Concerts at Shanti Bhavan usually come together within an afternoon. It usually freaks out most of the Western volunteers who are used to planning, organization, and preparation time – but like I said before, one of the greatest lessons India has taught me so far is to just let go.

By show time, Summer was ready to play a prelude from one of the Bach cello suites, I would be playing a Chopin piece, we’d both be playing “The Swan” from Carnival of the Animals, and all of the volunteers (over a dozen!) danced a Bhangra – successfully choreographed and taught in under one hour by one of our really awesome volunteers Sabala who has been doing Indian dance for a number of years. It was SO much fun to learn an Indian dance and put it together as a group. Shanti Bhavan is known for making all of its volunteers somehow participate in these performances – and just about every volunteer who’s come through the door here has at some point learned and performed an Indian dance (complete with Indian attire). It’s just part of the program here!

Some volunteers – especially the professional musicians and/or actors – are at first pretty nervous to have to perform under these circumstances. Nothing is ideal for performing – the instruments are in rough shape, the lighting can fail at any moment when the power goes out, loud and exotic bird calls interrupting your concentration….you name it. One tends, at first, to try to make the usual excuses “Oh no, I can’t perform - I haven’t practiced in weeks” or “I don’t have anything ready to perform” or “I don’t dance”– but you quickly learn that here at Shanti Bhavan, everything is about love and support. Everyone is accepted here – no excuses. Everyone wants the happiness of listening to you play, watching you dance, hearing you sing, etc. – judgment never crosses their minds as it seems all “performances” are not performances but simply celebrations.