Samita Sinha, Tremor

Creator/Performer: Samita Sinha 

 Composer/Performer: Ash Fure 

 Movement: Darrell Jones 

 Vocal Performer/Dramaturg: Sunder Ganglani 

Visual Designer: Sunil Bald 

Lighting Designer: James Proudfoot 

Associate Lighting Designer: Sarai Frazier 

Tremor is an emergent and iterative performance and practice. Tremor was co-commissioned by Western Front and Danspace Project. Previous iterations included Okwui Okpokwasili, and near-future iterations will include Cecilia Vicuna and Daniel Neumann. The contributions and vibrations of past, present, and future collaborators have shaped what Tremor is and how it now grows. 

Artist, composer, and educator Samita Sinha (Creator/Performer) creates multidisciplinary performance works that unravel Indian vocal traditions through the body to create a decolonized, multivalent language of vibration and voice.  She performs her work nationally and internationally and shares her practice and pedagogy extensively, most recently as Visiting Professor of Sonic Practice at Dartmouth College. Sinha has received commissions from Asia Society, Danspace Project, Lower Manhattan Cultural Council, Performance Space New York, The Rubin Museum of Art, Queens Museum, Gibney Dance, and Western Front, and awards from the National Endowment for the Arts, Fulbright Foundation, National Performance Network, and New York State Council on the Arts. 

Ash Fure’s (Composer/Performer) full-bodied sonic experiences work on the senses in startling ways. Called “purely visceral” and “staggeringly original” by The New Yorker, Fure’s live performances and built-out worlds mobilize the elemental force of sound, the social muscle of listening, and our animal capacity to sense. Winner 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 Sonic Arts at Dartmouth College, and was named co-artistic director of The Industry LA in 2021. 

Sunder Ganglani (Vocal performer/dramaturg) is a dramaturg, musician, composer, and writer. His work is a collaboration between art forms—music, theater, civil disobedience, pedagogy, and the visual arts. As co-artistic director of The Foundry Theater, his work with Claudia Rankine, W. David Hancock, David Greenspan, and many others has toured nationally and internationally. At the moment, he’s working on new experiments in music with composers Justin Hicks, Esperanza Spalding, Helga Davis, and Meshell Ndegeocello; new experiments in co-created performance with Charlotte Brathwaite, June Cross, Cauleen Smith, and Ak Jansen; and a public protest mass on the 6th extinction with Savitri Durkee, Reverend Billy, and The Stop Shopping Choir. 

Darrell Jones (Movement) is a performer, educator, researcher, and choreographer. He has performed extensively across the United States and globally, in venues such as Links Hall in Chicago, Danspace Project, Dance Box – Kobe, Japan, and the Venice Biennale. He maintains long-term collaborative relationships with Bebe Miller Company and Ralph Lemon. Additional foundational experiences have included working with Min Tanaka, Ronald K. Brown, Kokuma Dance Theatre (Birmingham, UK), and Urban Bush Women.  Jones is a two-time Bessie Award recipient and has received grants and awards including the 3Arts Award, Chicago Dancemakers Forum Lab Artist, Foundation for Contemporary Arts, and the MAP Fund. He is a tenured faculty member at The Dance Center of Columbia College Chicago where he teaches classes in physical practice, performance, and improvisational techniques. He holds an MFA in Dance from Florida State University.  

Sunil Bald (Visual designer) is an architect and educator. He is Professor and Associate Dean at the Yale School of Architecture where he teaches architectural design, theory, and visualization. For over twenty years he was a partner of the New York-based Studio SUMO, which in 2015 was recognized by the American Academy of Arts and Letters with its Annual Prize in Architecture. Sunil works at a range of scales, from site-specific installations to designs for institutional and cultural buildings, both domestically and abroad. His work has been exhibited in venues including the National Building Museum, MoMA, The Field Museum, and the Venice Biennale; and has been supported by fellowships from the Fulbright Foundation, the Graham Foundation, NYSCA, and NYFA. 

James Proudfoot (Lighting designer) is a lighting designer/director based in Vancouver, Canada. He is originally from Edinburgh, Scotland, where he received his initial theatre training. Self-taught in the realm of dance lighting, he has contributed designs to many artists and companies over the past 25 years. James is grateful to live and work on the unceded territories of the Musqueam, Squamish, and Tsleil-Waututh Nations. 

Sarai Frazier (Associate Lighting designer) is a Bessie nominated, NYC-based lighting designer and production/stage manager working in the field of performance art, theatre, and film. Sarai is interested in lighting design not only as it contributes to storytelling, but as its own medium to view, engage, and interact with. She is deeply passionate about painting with light and is excited to be working in Chicago for the first time.  Some of her selected works as a lighting designer include Art Workers Are Artists Too (PSNY), I AM PAUSE (Canal Projects, Performa), and All Things Under Dog: where two things are always true (PSNY + HAU2).  

Special thanks from the artist: 

Endless gratitude to my sangha—Sunil Bald, Ash Fure, Sunder Ganglani, Darrell Jones, James Proudfoot, and Sarai Frazier—for your total generosity and commitment, and to Ralph Lemon and Parvathy Baul for your teachings. Thank you Laura Paige Kyber and Tara Aisha Willis for your care and vision in bringing this work to MCA, and to the staff and crew at the MCA who made this happen.  Thank you to Western Front and Danspace—Susan Gibb, Ben Wilson, Judy Hussie-Taylor, and Seta Morton—for supporting this work to come into being.  Thank you to Amber Musser, Joshua Takano Chambers-Letson, and Archita Arun for co-creating Attunement in Chicago. Finally, thank you Sunil, for being my home.