06/08/2019
Link to full video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FC8SR1jj9tA
Can you think back on the days when you just sit with your friends and chill? No worries, no stress, just you and your friends together, chatting and relaxing. It’s where you are most comfortable, most yourself, and probably the most accepted. The story of Open Sky Slam starts with one such day. With friends, a terrace, and the spirit of performing.
4 and a half years ago, a group of friends got together on a terrace and decided to perform for each other. It was an odd, mixed group of poets and musicians, a dancer, a stand-up comedian, and even a magician! That day went so well, everyone felt like it should happen again. And it did! The next month, it happened on another friend's terrace. Then another. And another. At that point, there weren't too many places artists where could just go perform, and that group of friends discovered a platform right there amongst each other. And today, we are known as Open Sky Slam, a place that has managed to keep that sentiment alive and kicking.
Soon after we started on those terrace sessions, a cafe offered us a place to perform with mics and speakers - an actual performance stage. These cafe sessions of ours happened again and again, growing with each performance. Pretty soon, restaurants and cafes heard about our gigs and called us to their places to perform too!
That's not all! Some of the initial performers who had come to Bangalore just for a while went back to their cities. And just like that, OSS spread to other parts of the country. Pretty soon, we had established ourselves in Bangalore, Mumbai, Calicut, Pune, Hyderabad and Chennai. There was no competition, no judgement. Just a bunch of people and their love of performing. We started out with just some artists wanting to perform for each other and today we’ve become a growing community.
Now, OSS just looks forward to growth. New performers, new places, new pieces. We just want our community to grow, holding onto its roots of performing only for the love of performing. We want to give budding artists platforms in places they aren't available. We want to get more artists involved in cities we are already well established in. Our goal is to continue providing a safe space for artists to perform freely.
What makes OSS special is the fact that it was never planned. We never started out thinking it would ever be this big. Everything happened organically. OSS built itself. It made itself bigger and bigger, with plenty of people helping along the way. It’s fresh and constantly brimming with energy, always ready to grow!
Open Sky Slam was a name we came up with that literally described what we had started off doing - performing under the open sky. Since then, our name has come to mean much more. It grew like our organization, becoming more inclusive and larger - a symbolic representation of our openness for artists to do what they love limitlessly under our open skies!
