Something memorable just happened in a quiet corner of Liverpool city centre, home to Milapfest, at the Creative Campus of Liverpool Hope University. Over the past 11 days, a gathering of musicians and dancers , through the convergence of three landmark events in our calendar, Music India, Dance India and the Indika festival, resulted in an atmosphere of unique creative energy and inspiration for Indian arts.

Over the last fortnight, over 200 international musicians and dancers came to Liverpool as students, performers, gurus and tutors, as part of the three programmes. It was a fortnight of memorable concerts, intensive teaching and sharing, and unique new collaborations. We write this to you just minutes after the end of Dance India, the international summer school for dance. Our students are slowly filtering away towards railway stations and airports, taking with them a host of memories and excellent experiences. In the closing ceremony of Dance India, students talked about the new energy and inspiration they take with them, the new way of looking at life, the examples of inner strength and creativity that they got from the education programme.

These days were all about collaboration and coming together, and we have a huge array of unprecedented events to look back on, whether it’s the duet of flute maestros Shashank and Rakesh Chaurasia, the coming together of Priyadarsini Govind and Sujata Mohapatra, or last night’s duet between Leela Samson and Sanjukta Sinha.