Tremor
- Samita Sinha
Western Front is pleased to present Tremor, a new performance by Samita Sinha. Tremor is the emergence of voice through wreckage and a celebration of the body as a gateway to the cosmos.
Sinha works with fragments from Indian vocal traditions as vessels to harness and liberate energy through the body and sound. In Tremor, she voices in relationship to a live and immersive sonic environment conjured by composer Ash Fure, and is joined by performer Okwui Okpokwasili, with lighting design by James Proudfoot.
Tremor will later tour to Danspace Project for its New York City premiere in November 2023, where it will be presented with a spatial design by architect Sunil Bald, which is currently in development.
About the Artists
Samita Sinha is an artist and composer based in New York City. She creates multidisciplinary performance works that investigate origins of voice. Sinha draws from training in Indian vocal traditions and embodied energetic practices to create a decolonized, bodily, multivalent language of vibration and transformation.
Sunil Bald is an American architect and educator. He is a founding partner in the New York-based Studio SUMO, an acclaimed architecture and design firm that aims to “respond to contextual forces that include the physical, social, cultural, and historical conditions of site, program and type, while striving for solutions that are inventive and unexpected.” Bald has taught at several post-secondary institutions and has an enduring research interest in modernism, popular culture and nation-making in Brazil.
Ash Fure is a sonic artist who blends installation and performance to create full-bodied sonic experiences that work on the senses in startling ways. The recipient of two Lincoln Center Emerging Artists Awards, a Guggenheim Fellowship, a Rome Prize in Music Composition, a DAAD Artists-in-Berlin Prize, a Foundation for Contemporary Arts Grant for Artists, a Fulbright Fellowship to France, a Stuttgart Composition Prize, a Darmstadt Kranichsteiner Musikpreis, and a Mellon Postdoctoral Fellowship from Columbia University, Fure holds a PhD in Music Composition from Harvard University, is associate professor of music at Dartmouth College and was named co-artistic director of The Industry LA in 2021.
Okwui Okpokwasili is a Brooklyn-based performer, choreographer, and writer creating multidisciplinary performance pieces. The child of immigrants from Nigeria, Okpokwasili was born and raised in the Bronx, and the histories of these places and the girls and women who inhabit them feature prominently in much of her work. Awards include a 2018 Princeton University Hodder Fellowship and a 2018 MacArthur Fellowship. In 2022, she was the inaugural artist for the Kravis Studio Residency program at MoMA.
Accessibility
The Grand Luxe Hall is located on the second floor of Western Front, which is accessed by a flight of 26 stairs. While plans for a full building upgrade to facilitate access for wheelchair users are still underway, all events in the Grand Luxe Hall are made available virtually via high-quality livestream (see link above). Further details about accessibility at Western Front can be found here. Please feel free to contact Western Front directly at info@westernfront.ca or +1 (604) 876-9343 for specific access requests in advance of your visit.
Acknowledgements
Presented with support from the Government of Canada and the SOCAN Foundation.
Developed with additional support from Danspace Project, who supported Sinha with a number of unique residency opportunities, the “Breathing Room” virtual workshop series, and as a Danspace Project Research Fellow from 2021-23 through support from the Mellon Foundation.
Thanks to Darrell Jones who acted as a thought partner to Sinha across the development of Tremor, and to Aram Bajakian for initiating the project at Western Front.
Western Front is a non-profit artist-run centre in Vancouver.
We acknowledge the xʷməθkʷəy̓əm (Musqueam), Skwxwú7mesh (Squamish), and səl̓ílwətaʔɬ (Tsleil-Waututh) Nations as traditional owners of the land upon which Western Front stands.