Being Becoming, the evening-length production by Malini Srinivasan and Dancers, is going on tour! We kick off our tour close to home in NYC (2/27), then travel to Swiss cities Geneva (3/2), Zurich (3/7), and Winterthur (3/8), and finally perform in Chicago, USA (3/10). Check out our tour details on www.malinisrinivasan.com. This is the first time Malini Srinivasan and Dancers is going on an international performance tour, and we are very excited about it!
Through Kickstarter, we aim to raise $2500 in the days leading up to our first show in Switzerland. We truly appreciate your enthusiasm and support in helping make this tour a reality.
Being Becoming had a sold-out run at the 2012 New York International Fringe Festival, and was awarded the 2012 Outstanding Choreography Award from the NYC Fringe. It is a 75-minute dance performance with dancers Malini Srinivasan, Kadhambari Sridhar, and Umesh Venkatesan. Direction by Josh Penzell, with new Carnatic music composed by Roopa Mahadevan and Akshay Anantapadmanabhan.
Being Becoming explores an ideal central to Hindu and Buddhist philosophies: that one can become the object of their devotion, meditation or desire. The idea of losing oneself or being consumed by the other is extensively expressed in Indian traditions of poetry, music, painting and dance. Each piece in Being Becoming explores the different ways in which the individual seeks to become one with the other, as well as traditional Indian theater techniques that enact the transformation from actor to character.
Thanks to Josh Penzell for creating our Kickstarter video, photographers Ganesh Ramachandran, Ian Douglas, and Reet Das for creating the images of Being Becoming.
Risks and challenges
One of the main challenges the Being Becoming team faces is bringing our work to diverse audiences on very different stages. Being Becoming was created for the White Box at 440 Studios, our venue at Fringe NYC. In this intimate venue, the audience was never more than 10 feet away from the performers...sometimes much less!
When we take this show on the road, we will be performing in theaters ranging from a 500-seat school auditorium (the Henry Dunant school in Geneva), to a stunning church in Zurich, to our cozy Anamika Navatman studio in NYC. It is vital that show really works with each theater...and with each audience member, no matter where they are or what language they speak. This means re-creating the show each time we perform it.
Luckily, we have collaborators in each city that are committed to making Being Becoming a success. Whether it is making translations of the program notes in German, or finding the right spotlight, we know they are on our side. We think we have a good chance of making a real connection with our audiences.
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Funding period
- (23 days)