Kalpa secretary Pradip Jyoti Mahanta addresses the news meet on Tuesday. Picture by UB Photos

Jan. 31: The three-day Pragjyoti International Dance Festival 2012 will be held at Rabindra Bhawan from February 2 to 4. The festival will be organised by Kalpa, a society for promotion of literature, art, culture and social harmony in association with The Telegraph and supported by the Indian Council for Cultural Relations and the directorate of cultural affairs, government of Assam.

While Assam governor Janaki Ballav Patnaik will inaugurate the festival, a souvenir titled Pragjyoti will be released by Shantanu Thakur, secretary of the department of cultural affairs.

The festival is being dedicated to the memory of balladeer Bhupen Hazarika.

“We have been organising this dance festival since 2009 and every year our focus is to promote the different Indian classical dance forms among the young generation of our state. Even today many youngsters do not have a comprehensive knowledge about the dance forms, but strangely there are foreign nationals who have embraced these dance forms after coming to India and know a lot more about the Indian heritage. Besides, the young artists who will be staging classical dances like Bharatanatyam, Mohiniyattam, Kathak, Odissi, Xattriya and Kuchipudi are very skilled in their craft,” Pradip Jyoti Mahanta, secretary of Kalpa, said.

Apart from the dance performances, the festival will also feature a photo exhibition called Reflections and includes a photo collection called In Memoriam on the life of Bhupen Hazarika. The festival also includes interactive sessions between the dancers and students from various institutions in the city.

“We have been able to make a good collection of photographs over the years, which will be exhibited during the festival. Like every year, this time also we have organised interactive sessions during which school students will be able to converse with the artistes on varied topics related to the Indian classical tradition. The interaction session will highlight on the relevance of the Indian dance in the contemporary period and this will help the students,” Anwesa Mahanta, director of the Pragjyoti International Dance Festival, said.