ಬೆಂಗಳೂರುlinear: This September, Bengaluru's Metro Will Help Host A One-Of-A-Kind Festival

Anyone who has lived in Bengaluru knows that traffic often dictates the rhythm of the city. Getting across town for an evening performance can feel like an ordeal in itself. The founders of Linear Festivals saw this constraint not as a limitation, but as the spark for an idea: what if the city’s Green Metro Line became the spine of a festival, turning the act of travel itself into part of a cultural experience? From that thought, ಬೆಂಗಳೂರುlinear (Bangalore Linear) was born.

A 24-hour citywide festival, the event unfolds from 3 pm on September 13 to 3 pm on September 14, 2025, bringing together seven premiere shows in a format that stretches across genres, languages, and regions. Its curation emphasises breadth: from folk forms like Thogalu Gombeyata performed by masters such as Gundu Raju, to experimental electronic sets, hip-hop from Ajmer, theatre from Kerala, and music that traces its roots to the Lepcha community in Sikkim and the hills of Arunachal Pradesh.

Festival directors Vishruti Bindal and Bharavi, who together hold more than three decades of experience in performance-making, envision ಬೆಂಗಳೂರುlinear as a space of discovery. “In India, we don’t yet have a deep culture of regular performance attendance,” Bindal notes. “With Linear, we’re building a space where a theatre lover might stumble into a hip-hop gig, or a metalhead into a contemporary dance performance.” For Bharavi, the festival also represents a reclamation of folk traditions in their truest form: “It bothered me that shadow puppeteers like Gunduraju don’t get to perform in Bangalore through the night, as the art was meant to be experienced. We really wanted to fix that—one night at a time.”

The festival lineup features Roshan Mathew’s play 'Bye Bye Bypass', Shilpa Mudbi’s intimate ‘Songs of my Ancestors’, Aseng Borang’s reworked 'The Chinky Express Comes to Town', sets by Fat Krrent, Anohnymouss, Zeron, and the debut of 'khokkosh. skinned – live'. Each performance, in its own way, promises an encounter with something unfamiliar, be it language, memory, or sound.

The venues for ಬೆಂಗಳೂರುlinear stretch from PCPA in Konankunte Cross to Bangalore Creative Circus in Mahalakshmi, with every space within walking distance of a metro station. For audiences, this means a rare opportunity: the chance to traverse the city without a car and experience art in unexpected contexts, from midnight puppetry to all-night epics.

At its core, ಬೆಂಗಳೂರುlinear is experimenting with how art belongs to a city. By rooting itself in the metro line, it collapses the distance between performance and everyday life, making the act of moving through Bangalore inseparable from the act of encountering culture. It is not only a festival of theatre, music, and dance, but also a study in how urban infrastructure can carry new forms of community and expression.

Follow Linear Festivals here and get your passes here.

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