Pan Asia Sounding Festival
Samita Sinha
featuring special guests Sunny Jain and Grey Mcmurray
6:30pm doors • 7:30pm show
About
The Pan Asia Sounding festival offers a fresh perspective on a vibrant continent with groundbreaking performances that focus on the ever-evolving present and future of Asian music and art. Too often, Western presentations of Asian artists focus exclusively on ancient cultural traditions. Curated by Pulitzer Prize–winning composer Du Yun, the Pan Asia Sounding festival explodes this biased lens by presenting new works on the cutting edge of contemporary performance.
The “remarkable (and lovely)” Samita Sinha (New Yorker) launches the festival with a new piece about cultural inheritance and the experience, as she puts it, “of being a body in the world”. By deconstructing classical Indian art forms, she examines the ways they represent — and have the potential to re-form — the female body. As the Village Voice notes, “Sinha is channeling the contradictions of the South Asian psyche around gender and sexuality, in a series of intimate shows that burst with feral energy”.
In this show, Sinha will be joined by special guests Sunny Jain — an internationally acclaimed star best known for his work with Red Baraat — and Grey McMurray — a beloved Brooklyn singer, guitarist, and songwriter. Ferocious and incisive, Samita Sinha is a performer who demands attention.
This program is supported, in part, by public funds from the New York City Department of Cultural Affairs in partnership with the City Council.
Tickets
The Artists
Samita Sinha combines tradition and experimentation to compose vocal performance works that investigate cultural inheritance and the experience of being a body in the world. Works include This ember state (2018, commissioned by Asia Society), bewilderment and other queer lions (2016, commissioned by Performance Space 122 and Invisible Dog Art Center for the COIL Festival) and Cipher (2014–15, a solo work that toured nationally). She has composed and performed original scores for dance and theater works by Dean Moss, Fiona Templeton, and Preeti Vasudevan; vocal directed for Daria Fain and Robert Kocik; and performed with Sekou Sundiata and Robert Ashley. Sinha teaches voice extensively, including at the Rubin Museum of Art, Centro Nacional de las Artes (Mexico City), Swarthmore College, and Womankind (formerly New York Asian Women’s Center).
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