Karnatic Meets Kattaikkuttu: Notes on an Unusual Cultural Conversation

Hanne M. de Bruin

Karnatic Meets Kattaikkuttu is an experimental production in which urban karnatic concert music and rural kattaikkuttu theatre artists collaborate on equal footing, ignoring the division of the Indian performing arts into “classical” and “folk.” Using music, language, and acting, the production addresses the blindness that prevents people, entrenched within their own cultural, social, and political ghettoes, from experiencing any art form with an open mind


Article in TDR published in September

Theatre in London in dec

December 2019

Saw two very different but wonderful productions in London

Whilst staying with my sister and family

Death of a Salesman by Arthur Miller

Directed by Marianne Elliot and Miranda Cromwell

Starring Wendell Pierce (The Wire, Suits, Selma) makes his West End stage debut as Willy Loman, with Olivier Award-winning Sharon D. Clarke as Linda Loman.

Touching the Void adapted by David Greig

Directed by Tom Morris

Plus Christmas Tree in Trafalgar Square

Everybody

"Everybody" by Branden Jacobs-Jenkins

Everybody is summoned by God to make account of their life before passing into the unknown afterlife. Everybody solicits Friendship, Kinship, and Worldly Goods to accompany them, only to discover, "you can't take it with you." Jacobs-Jenkins' play, "a very meta and saucy adaptation" (Time Out NY) of a 15th century Morality Play and tells the same allegorical and thought provoking story only with humor, modern theatrics, and contemporary commentary on stage representation.

Directed by Kirk Jackson. 

Projections of text and animated globe, and skeletons on to back wall

Set designed by Seancolin Hankins

October 2019 Bennington College

Mixed Bag

Formula Grand Prix in Montreal June 2019

Yo Yo Ma plays Bach @ Tanglewood 11th Aug 2019

Ubu presented by Kneehigh Theatre at Carlyon Bay, Cornwall

Tigger with mud bath

NAB exhibition nY Oct 2019

High Line in October

Antigone dir. Satoshi Miyagi  Park armory , NYC

Why? by Peter Brook and Marie-Hélene Estienne  Polonsky Shakespeare Center, Brooklyn, NY

Oct 2019

Sarah Sze at Tanya Bonakdar Gallery

The Place we Built

by Sarah Gancher

directed by Jean Randich.

In a deserted neighborhood in post-communist Budapest, young bohemians squat in an abandoned building and build a bar. Reclaiming the Jewish identity their parents’ generation abandoned after the Holocaust, they create a vibrant new subculture that combines big ideas and intense debates with wild parties. Friendships form and fray, couples recombine, people change, the neighborhood is transformed. But when authoritarianism and anti-Semitism make a surprise comeback in the country at large, will the place they built survive? A tale of friendship, idealism, and coming of age, set against the backdrop of Hungary’s current terrifying slide into dictatorship—and the global rise of right-wing populism.

Music arrangement and direction: Bruce Williamson

Designs by: 
Sue Rees (set and projections)
Olivera Gajic (costumes)
Evan Grey Caldwell (lights)
Miran Kapor (sound)
Timothy Atkinson, Larry Dembski, and Keely Durkin (puppets)

Dramaturgy by:
Rob Ascher and Soumya Rachel Shailendra

Assistant directed by:
Inas Gacanin

Stage Managed by:
Florence Gill

Live video, wireless feeds, recorded imagery, tables, chairs, bar, painted wall, graffiti, staircase, puppet booth, hanging window frames, hanging books, wooden spoons, Winnie and Tigger ( my dogs), immersive environment

May 2019

Bennington College