The sun hadn't fully risen when Rakesh Chaurasia's bansuri began to fill the stone chapel in Khandala. Creative director and film director Pushan Kripalani’s voice lights up when he describes this sight, “The stained glass windows started to glow with the morning light, the building itself becoming part of the performance.”
This is Abbey 301, Maharashtra's newest cultural venue, and it promises to offer nothing like any performance space you've encountered before.
Tucked into the Sahyadri hills between Mumbai and Pune, the basalt structure has been speaking for nearly two centuries. Built sometime between the 1840s and 1870s to serve British and Anglo-Indian communities, it fell silent after independence as congregations dwindled and was deconsecrated, after which it was was acquired by the Kotak family. Now, under the stewardship of Krishna and Kamini Kotak and creative director Pushan Kripalani, Abbey 301 has found its voice. The stained glass remains, the Gothic Revival architecture speaks its colonial history, but the programming charts an entirely new direction.
On February 15 of last year, 50 people were uninvited to examine the viability of the venue as a performance space. One hundred and thirty showed up with no marketing and mostly word of mouth. The programming was deliberately a mix that celebrated craft. Mumbai acapella group Aflatunes. Actor Arunoday Singh performing spoken word. Genre-defying sitarist Purbayan Chatterjee.
The recent opening at the end of January featured an eclectic lineup. Poet lyricist Kausar Munir inaugurated the space with spoken word. Singer Nikhil D'Souza performed in the afternoon. A jazz trio led by Sanjay Divecha filled the evening. And then came that sunrise concert with Rakesh Chaurasia and Ojas Adhiya, where the stained glass became part of the performance itself.
"Unlike a neutral black box venue" Kripalani says "this room keeps asserting itself. From the moment you see it, walk around it, step out for coffee, the building is always speaking." With a maximum capacity of just 100, Abbey 301 faces an issue that most venues would find terrifying. How do you sustain a cultural space in the hills when you can barely fit a hundred people through the door?
"The stained glass windows started to glow with the morning light; the building itself becoming part of the performance."Pushan Kripalani, Creative director of Abbey 301 and film director
Kripalani's answer combines pragmatism. Static arts, sculpture, painting, photography will hopefully "pay for Monday through Thursday" through longer exhibitions and art sales. The current ongoing exhibition of ceramic works by Bhopal contemporary artist G Reghu exemplifies this approach. Dynamic performances would happen on weekends, with ticket pricing calculated so that each show can break even.
"We're still figuring out viability and price points" Kripalani admits. "We've only done four public performances." There's another deliberate choice at work which is the decision to eliminate the fourth wall. "We're actively removing the distance between audience and performer" he explains. It's a fresh approach to curation, hoping that 100 genuinely attentive people would have a more rewarding experience than in a thousand-seat venue.
The most technically impressive aspect of Abbey 301 might be invisible. The chapel's acoustics were originally designed for a single voice or unaccompanied choir exactly the wrong sonic profile for amplified contemporary music.
Sound engineer Mujeeb Dadarkar, who previously worked with Ustad Zakir Hussain, spent five days testing the room. He identified the specific frequencies the building naturally exaggerates then subtracted those frequencies from the PA mix. The result is what Kripalani claims might be "one of the best places for music in the country" a space where the stone walls enhance rather than muddy the sound.
For Xerxes Unvala, who heads strategy at Abbey 301, having formerly led the Symphony Orchestra of India, the chapel is a laboratory where artists can safely try something outside their usual comfort zones. “It’s a very different space for an audience to experience a performance,” he says. “The fact that the venue is outside the city plays into the experience. It really starts when you get in the car and travel out here, and you arrive already in a different mind space”.
There are plans for a permanent café operator to keep the campus open daily, independent of performance schedule while currently relying on pop-up food vendors around events. The goal is to make the space accessible for visitors to enjoy exhibitions, café, and atmosphere even without attending shows. "We are hoping artists will develop new projects inspired by seeing the unique venue", says Unvala. Looking ahead, Abbey 301 is developing film and theatre series alongside a strand of Western classical concerts, beginning on March 21 with a recital of Beethoven’s sonatas for cello and piano.
"The fact that the venue is outside the city plays into the experience. It really starts when you get in the car and travel out here, and you arrive already in a different mind space."Xerxes Unvala, who heads strategy at Abbey 301
The venue plans to host performances initially two weekends a month and start slow, eventually ramping up to a full calendar. Comedian Anuvab Pal is scheduled to perform soon as well. Literary events are being considered, a nod to the original idea of converting the chapel into a library to house the Kotak family's collection of over 3,000 books. Abbey 301 is expecting art and music audiences from Mumbai, Pune, and the local area for unique experiences.
On a hill between India's two major western cities, the 200-year-old chapel is speaking again. This time, it's saying something new. The reimagining of the space places Kishore Kumar next to choral music, Nina Simone next to contemporary poetry, and always the steady glow of stained glass from its colourful past. "We're not trying to make the space neutral" Kripalani insists. "We're trying to let it be what it can become. A space where one human heart talks to another in an intimate, changing space”.
Abbey 301 is located in Khandala, approximately 100 kilometers from both Mumbai and Pune.
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