Lullaby, Stranger
LULLABY, STRANGER | SHAPESHIFT COLLECTIVE
tuesday, february 25 to friday, february 28
6:00 PM & 9:00 PM
at the G5A Black Box
Lullaby, Stranger combines the experience of a choral music concert and a theatre performance. In a single room, 40-50 audience members are invited to lie down alone. The person on the neighbouring mattress will likely be someone they do not know. In this intimate, yet public, environment, the audience listens to the concert.
A vocal choir, comprising 10-12 singers/performers mediates the audience’s sensory experience. The singers move in a carefully choreographed design, which continually shifts the source of the sound as perceived by the audience. The singers sometimes stay along the walls of the room, surrounding the audience, and at other times, move between them, or lie beside audience members, or sit close to them and sing in whispers. In these movements, the singers (along with their music) appear and disappear, becoming more intimate or increasingly unfamiliar. Soon, the room becomes a site of a ritual of mass privacy, in which audiences undergo a sensory experience that creates and challenges at different times their feelings of privacy, collectivity, isolation and solidarity.
The lighting shifts between low visibility, blinding brightness, and absolute darkness, further complicating and intensifying the sensory progression—the relationship between performer and spectator, and between the spectators themselves is constantly rearranged to stir moments of both tenderness and discomfort.
The music pieces in the concert all speak to the intimacy and privacy experienced by humans, especially in bed. The repertoire is a mix of choral compositions from different cultures and includes songs of love and fulfillment, of absence, loss and loneliness, of longing and pining, of lullabies and sleeplessness and erotic fantasies, of prayer and death. The languages include German, Kashmiri, Japanese, Swedish, Arabic, Latin and English. By performing these songs to people in bed, the work wants to make, in the typically public and anonymous performance space, an offering of intimacy.
Conducted by Salome Rebello
Designed and Choreographed by Sujay Saple
Performers: Anusha Ramasubramoney, Delraaz Bunshah, Mansi Multani/Nihaarika Lyra Dutt, Prakriti Dutta Mukherjee, Rachel Philip, Sharvari Deshpande/Karishma Dlima, Sonam Gaychen Wangdi, Abhijit Jejurikar, Abhishek Chatterjee, Akshay Sharma, Ashish Choudhary, Gaurav Banerjee/Mark Alvares, Siddhanth Shetty
Sound Consultant: Naren Chandavarkar
Production Manager: Samrat Chandanshive
Supported by G5A Foundation for Contemporary Culture
a Shapeshift production
Passes available on BookMyShow
