Slovenia to Bengal: A Musical Conversation Across Cultures

Images credits: The Rolling Crew

Ruuh-Bakhsh, formed by Tajdar Junaid, Satyaki Banerjee and Rabi Mondal, is dedicated to performing and preserving the folk traditions of Bengal. For BLR Hubba 2026, Linear commissioned and presented a new live collaboration between the trio and Slovenian accordionist Matija Solce.

Some collaborations begin with months of planning, endless conversations and carefully exchanged ideas. Others begin with uncertainty.

When Slovenian musician, puppeteer and theatre-maker Matija Solce arrived in India to collaborate with Tajdar Junaid’s project, ‘Ruuh-Bakhsh’ featuring musicians Satyaki Banerjee and Rabi Mondal, neither artist really knew what to expect. They had never encountered each other's work before. Emails about repertoire had gone unanswered. Video clips revealed little about who Matija was as a performer. Everything, as Tajdar puts it, felt like "a leap of faith."

And yet, perhaps that uncertainty became the collaboration's greatest strength. The plan was simple: begin with easier compositions, allow Matija to become familiar with the melodies, and gradually move into more complex pieces. But very quickly, structure gave way to instinct. "There was hardly any ego in the room," Tajdar recalls. "Only warmth, trust, and the joy of sharing music across two different cultures." What emerged wasn't an attempt to make one tradition resemble another. It was something gentler, a conversation where each artist listened before responding.

For Matija, whose artistic practice constantly dissolves the boundaries between theatre and music, improvisation has always been central. His performances rarely separate storytelling from sound; his accordion functions less like an instrument and rather, more like a fifth limb. So walking into a rehearsal where spontaneity was welcomed rather than restrained felt surprisingly natural. One of the most remarkable aspects of the collaboration is that it functioned almost entirely beyond language. Matija did not understand the Bengali or Hindi lyrics being sung. But something else resonated with him.

"The vibe and energy," Tajdar says, "that's what is most crucial in a collaboration."

For Matija, this experience reinforced something he has spent years discovering while travelling the world with nothing more than an accordion and a suitcase of puppets: communication often begins long before words do. Music offered a shared vocabulary. Although their musical traditions evolved in vastly different parts of the world, both artists found themselves returning to the same source.

"All folk sounds have the same base," Tajdar reflects. "The smell of earth."

It is an image that perfectly captures the collaboration.

In many ways, the collaboration became a meeting of two folk imaginations. Matija arrived carrying the rhythmic and melodic instincts shaped by Eastern European folk traditions, while Tajdar and Ruuh-Bakhsh brought songs rooted in the landscapes and oral traditions of eastern India. Their shared language was not repertoire but an understanding that folk music, wherever it emerges, grows out of community, memory and lived experience. Once Matija understood that these songs emerged from lived tradition rather than technical display, he entered them effortlessly, not by replicating them, but by listening to what they carried. Improvisation became less about showing virtuosity and more about making space for another person's story. 

The collaboration also offered Matija an unexpected encounter with Indian audiences.

Having performed across continents—in theatres, prisons, festivals, ashrams and even people's homes, he noticed something distinctive about the response here. Rather than simply appreciating the performance aesthetically, audiences seemed deeply attentive and intentional with their way of engaging with the music. Every musical phrase, every pause, every subtle gesture felt like it had a space to settle amongst the crowd.

"It was a really cosy feeling," he reflects. "Every detail was appreciated."

For someone whose work constantly moves between experimental theatre and music, this openness felt significant. Matija recalls how he came away with a new understanding of what "alternative" artistic practice could mean in India, not merely unconventional performance, but a freedom to interpret, improvise and engage philosophically with art itself. It is a lesson he now hopes to carry back into his own teaching and creative practice. For Matija, art has always been political. A medium capable of stringing together two people who might otherwise never run into one another. For Tajdar, collaborations like these affirm something he has always believed: that remaining open to new ideas and people is itself an artistic practice.

Neither artist speaks about changing the other.

Instead, they speak about making room.

Room for different traditions.

Room for uncertainty.

Room for listening.

Perhaps that is why the collaboration feels so memorable. It was never about blending Slovenian and Bengali music into a seamless hybrid. It was about witnessing two artistic worlds meet with humility, trusting that the music would find its own direction.