Cipher is a work of contemporary vocal art that unravels the form of North Indian raga to excavate the transformative potentials embedded in rupture and loss. The voice is a thread that navigates the multitudes of geographies, histories, and energies that inhabit us. Cipher touches the bottom of what moves the voice to utter, and the transparent surface where we see its shapes—all within a live, vibrational space.
Cipher is produced by MAPP International. Cipher received support from National Performance Network (NPN) Creation Fund project co-commissioned by Portland Institute for Contemporary Art (PICA) in partnership with REDCAT, Atlas Center for the Performing Arts, and Center for the Arts at Virginia Tech and NPN. Cipher was co-commissioned by Wexner Center for the Arts at The Ohio State University, and was developed in part with the support of BRIC (Brooklyn, NY) and Atlas Center for the Performing Arts (Washington DC) and Topaz Arts (Queens, NY), and received funding support from the National Endowment for the Arts. The work traveled to multiple venues in 2014.
bewilderment and other queer lions
bewilderment and other queer lions, commissioned by Performance Space 122 and The Invisible Dog Art Center, was presented as part of COIL festival 2016. Created and composed by vocal artist Samita Sinha with direction by Ain Gordon, bewilderment and other queer lions is an intimate, immersive experience of voice, sound and image that radically transmutes Indian music traditions through the collaboration of composer Samita Sinha with musicians Sunny Jain (of Red Baarat) and Grey Mcmurray. Along with acclaimed visual artist Dani Leventhal and lighting designer Devin Cameron, Sinha digests a wide range of texts and imagery meditating on desire and diasporic experience to prophecy a mythic future.
Artist and composer Samita Sinha creates multidisciplinary performance works that unravel Indian vocal traditions through the body to create a decolonized, multivalent language of voice and vibration.