FESTIVAL PREVIEW | Serendipity Arts Festival Turns 10: A Decade of Performance, Possibility, And The Joy Of Being Completely Overwhelmed

By the time a festival hits its 10th edition, most of us expect it to behave like a grown-up. But Serendipity Arts Festival, turning ten this December in Panaji, Goa, is the sort of overachiever who celebrates its milestone by expanding, reinventing, and doing cartwheels across the region. Think of it as a friend who throws a birthday party and somehow ends up gifting you something instead.

For a decade now, Serendipity has insisted that the performing arts aren’t just about watching people on stage... they’re about being startled, provoked, enraptured, mostly being reminded that the world is a lot richer than the tiny version that fits inside our phones. In its big anniversary year from 12-21 December 2025, the festival is going all out. Across Panaji—from Azad Maidan to Santa Monica Jetty, from Kala Academy’s renovated sub-venues to the Old GMC complex—the festival is staging dance, theatre, and music programmes that prove one thing: performance is not a category. It’s a portal.

Dance Line-up

Razai, curated by Jayachandran Palazhy will be staged inside the Old GMC Building, but spiritually it’s somewhere between a dream, a memory, and a duvet commercial directed by an AI with emotional issues. With artists from India, Italy, and Japan, and an intimacy that somehow feels global, Razai turns a humble quilt into a sort of time-travelling, heartbreak-holding, imagination-triggering companion. Palazhy also brings Folios of Time 2.0 to The Theatre: essentially a creative bootcamp where emerging movement artists from India and the UK are mentored into transforming work-in-progress pieces into fully fledged, grown-up performances. Themes range from climate anxiety to migration to the randomness of war.

Elsewhere at The Foundry, Superhero questions why we insist on putting people into good and bad boxes. Deus Nos Acudi explores bodies trapped inside consumer society, which is relatable for anyone who has ever bought something online at 2 am because the algorithm whispered seductively. But the most anticipated performance is Enowate, a solo piece that translates as “truth stands.” Happening at Dinanath Mangeshkar Kala Mandir, it dives into identity, ancestry, and spiritual belonging with an intensity that makes you rethink your own reflection. Then there’s Tanusree Shankar’s double bill: Nimbus and Pallavi: one using clouds as metaphors for longing, the other weaving Carnatic violin and Odissi rhythms into a conversation between bodies and space. She follows it up with Samvatsar Katha, a lush visual journey through the turning of seasons, blending Sanskrit and Hindi so today’s audiences can feel the poetry without needing two dictionaries.

At the Old GMC, Geeta Chandran’s Bhagavathy unleashes a fierce goddess who might scare you a little but will also make you question the constructs we build around women. Ramman brings a centuries-old masked ritual from Devbhumi to The Quad, and Embodied presents a dialogue between classical and contemporary Manipuri dancers, proving that tradition and innovation don’t have to squabble like siblings. Then there’s Duty Free, curated by Ranjana Dave: an ever-evolving movement archive where improvisation, repetition, failure, and practice are left out in the open, like laundry on a line. Each day a different artist takes over a riverfront verandah, turning it into a home, a studio, and a stage.

Theatre Line-up

If dance is the festival’s beating heart, theatre is the bit that raises an eyebrow and asks, “Okay, but have you really thought about this?” Quasar Thakore Padamsee’s selections—Seconds Before Coming and Something Like Truth—explore women navigating desire, agency, trauma, and the messy, unpunctuated sentences of modern life. These aren’t plays that sit quietly. They growl, they question, they demand attention. Mahesh Dattani’s curated works take the baton and sprint toward the intersection of caste, gender, class, and survival. OTTAM: Born to Run examines the life of a Pariyar girl dreaming of athletic glory, only to be derailed by the violence of gender testing. Kavan, an Ambedkarite opera, uses satire to capture the realities of caste in 21st-century India. Mezok interrogates longing and bureaucracy, because who among us hasn’t been defeated by paperwork at least once?

Anuradha Kapur brings You Really Want to Know My Story?—a raw, research-based work about death-row prisoners that forces audiences to question the justice system they grew up trusting. She follows it with The Legends of Khasak, a theatrical adaptation that blends myth, philosophy, and Malayalam landscape into a fever dream, and Gosht Sanyukta Manapmanachi, celebrating the collaborative magic of Marathi theatre pioneers.

The Legends of Khasak, curated by Anuradha Kapur (Image courtesy Raneesh Raveendran)

Sankar Venkateswaran reimagines the Sanskrit classic Mṛcchakaṭikam through Kutiyattam’s rich grammar, and then pivots drastically to His Bob Marley from Kodihalli, a play infused with reggae spirit, caste politics, Brechtian breaks, and Kannada musical interludes. He also conceptualizes the Puppet Folk Arts Lab: a renaissance moment for 3000-year-old Indian puppetry traditions. Lillete Dubey presents Swang Jas Ki Tas, reviving an endangered folk theatre form with humour and social critique, and Nihsango Ishwar reimagines Krishna’s final day as a meditation on loneliness, divinity, and regret. If all this sounds like a lot, that’s because it is.

Music Line-up

‘River Raag’ curated by Bickram Ghosh, has audiences enjoying live music to stunning sunset views on the Mandovi River (Image courtesy Serendipity Arts Festi)

You could start your evening at Ustad, a tribute to Zakir Hussain, wander into Dard-e-Disco for retro Bollywood glitter, jump to jazz with The Revisit Project, then find yourself headbanging with Jack of Spade’z. It’s a bit like scrolling through your playlist on shuffle, except every track is performed live by people with astonishing talent.

Says Sunil Kant Munjal, Founder and Patron of Serendipity Arts Foundation, “Performing arts have an extraordinary power to connect communities. They bridge barriers of language and geography through rhythm, movement, and expression. Especially exciting about this year’s practices is the effort to hold on to centuries-old traditions while embracing new forms that reflect our changing times. This duality preserves our cultural heritage. It also creates platforms for artists to experiment and find new vocabularies.” Adding onto that, Smriti Rajgarhia, Director of Serendipity Arts, says: “The performing arts have always been at the heart of Serendipity. They remind us that art is not only something we watch, but something we feel, experience, and carry with us. In this 10th edition, we are celebrating the extraordinary journeys artists have taken with us over the years—and opening the doors to all that lies ahead.”

Other Festival Highlights Include:

• A Vintage Christmas: big band charm, Vegas-style glamour, and holiday nostalgia.
• Beat Route: folk meets electronic in a Rajasthan-Kerala mash-up.
• The Gold Standard: jazz classics reimagined for modern souls.
• SlyFly and The Blues Company: a storm of soul and blues.
• The Nagaland Madrigal Singers: choral beauty from sacred works to folk harmonies.
• Konkan Funk which makes coastal beats
• Motown Madness: Stevie, Supremes, MJ
• 1871 in 2025: a historical reviving of Mumbai’s early music clubs.
• Clay Play: clay instruments creating a sonic Goan procession.
• Vaarso + Anandadhara: Gujarat and Bengal exploring love through music.
• River Raag: a sunset jugalbandi cruise across the Mandovi.
• Fading Traditions, Emerging Sounds: a musical time capsule celebrating the festival’s decade-long journey.

From Vijay Thillaimuthu’s Oblation to Ontroerend Goed’s Handle with Care, the festival expands the very definition of performance. The Independent Music Production Grant returns with acts like Jatayu and Chirag Todi, while the B-Side platform champions experimental sound practices and emerging South Asian voices. International collaborations (from Pro Helvetia to British Council to Institut français India) continue to widen the festival’s cultural map.

Registrations are now open. The festival is free to enter, but certain performances need tickets. So if you’re the kind who waits until the last minute... don’t.

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