Serendipity Arts Festival returns to Panjim for its landmark 10th edition. Across riverfronts, heritage buildings, and hidden corners of the city, the festival brings together craft, culinary arts, theatre, music, dance, visual arts, photography, performance curated by leading voices from across disciplines and loved by audiences from around the world. 

Here are some insider must-do's straight from the team for this year. 

Goa is a Bebinca
December 14-21 | 1 hour | Immersive dining & theatre 
What makes a place linger in memory—its performance, its people, its flavour?Set in Fontainhas, Panjim’s old Latin Quarter, this immersive experience transforms a heritage venue into a living taverna. Goa’s tavernas were more than watering holes. They were at the intersection of identities, where Konkani and Portuguese mingled; where everyday life, politics, flower power and poetry shared tables; and where the quotidian became art.

The central drama, Goa is a Bebinca, is a layered slice of Goan history. Mary, a firecracker of a woman, runs her family’s taverna and is keen to put the business on the map; her father, fiercely rooted in tradition, is opposed.

The performance invites you to inhabit that world: to eat, listen, and remember as stories unfold between courses—of migration, fading traditions, and a community fighting for its identity. This isn't just a taste-off; it is a reflection on cultural preservation.

Through Chef Manu Chandra’s contemporary reimagining of Goan flavours and paChaak’s sensorial design, this show becomes a crucial dialogue between past and present. It asks: What does it mean to taste diversity and change?

This is a living, breathing feast that explores how tradition and innovation coexist, celebrating a place that still invites strangers to sit together and find themselves in each other’s stories.

Book here

The Legends of Khasak
December 17-20 | 3 hours | Theatrical performance
Revolving around O.V. Vijayan’s iconic magic realist novel The Legends of Khasak, this immersive theatrical performance traces the journey of a young man who arrives in a remote Kerala village, burdened by a troubled past. As he begins teaching at the village  single-teacher school, he is drawn inexorably into the rich tapestry of the land — its people, its myths, and the haunting whispers of its legends. Boundaries between the real and the imagined begin to dissolve, ushering him and the audience into a realm of philosophical introspection.

Set against a riverside playground, the performance unfolds like a dream, rendered through a sensorial symphony of fire, earth, water, scent, fog, and the vast open sky. Nature itself becomes the stage, as storytelling merges with the elements, stirring the soul and awakening wonder.

Book here

What Does Loss Taste Like?
December 14-21 | 30 minutes | Immersive installation 
A speculative journey through taste, memory, and survival in 2100 India.
What Does Loss Taste Like? is an immersive, multisensory installation by Chef Thomas Zacharias & The Locavore, in collaboration with Immerse and Quasar Thakore-Padamsee (QTP), that explores the slow disappearance of taste, memory, and biodiversity in a rapidly shifting foodscape. Set in the imagined year 2100, the experience unfolds across five interconnected rooms — each anchored in a once-familiar space now altered by climate collapse, cultural amnesia, and technological takeover.

From a kitchen where hardly anything is cooked to a kirana store lined with synthetically constituted food, each room hums with the quiet absence of heirloom ingredients, traditional recipes, everyday rituals, and food stories once passed down by hand and heart. Visitors are invited to encounter this loss not through spectacle, but through intimacy. Projected memory fragments, hollow ceremonial meals, and a final staircase that reignites hope trace a speculative yet emotionally grounded journey through grief, longing, and tender resistance. This is not dystopia. It is a near-future mirror—close enough to feel real, urgent, and entirely possible.

Book here

Other highlights
Don’t forget to check out the exciting line-up at The Arena at Nagalli Hills Ground through the festival.

Wild Wild Women | December 19 
Watch India's first all-female hip-hop crew bring their fierce lyricism & political commentary live.

The Gold Standard | December 18
Enjoy smoky ballads, powerful blues, smooth standards and bold improvisations

Ottam: Born to Run | December 14 
The life of Akai Amaran, a Paraiyar girl from rural Tamil Nadu, who battles caste and class barriers to become one of India’s leading athletes.

Mezok | December 21
A collection of interwoven stories that contemplates desire, a snow-covered mountain, and the intricate systems we inhabit.

Explore more here
The link has been copied!