Artist Statement

Underlying Indian vocal traditions is a practical and philosophical understanding that vibration creates life and can transform reality. This is encompassed by the concept of naad, whose literal meaning is sound, vibration, or resonance. On a deeper level, naad refers to a creative, eternal force that flows through the universe and all of existence, which we can experience in sound as well as in silence. Naad is the sound within the sound; the space before the sound; and the life-force or energy within sound.

The Bengali Baul tradition reaches naad through devotional song and the body, and North Indian classical music through profound attention to intonation.  I have trained deeply in both traditions, and unraveled their forms–and their dogmas–through my body and mind to liberate their core power. 

My contemporary artistic practice radically evolves this freed essence into a new, trans-disciplinary vision of sound and performance. I work with the generative and regenerative properties of sound to emerge voice, recuperate bodies and being, and unnumb our exiled capacity to sense vibrationally and multi-dimensionally, which in turn frees possibilities of relation to self, other, the earth and its life forms, and the cosmos.

The formless, which I perceive to be at once empty and immeasurably abundant, guides my work.  In my compositional process I distill traditional forms to create precise, flexible containers through which to access and shape the formless into living, breathing vibrational architectures that re-form the invisible forces that shape and break us, and suture the threads of life.

Bio

Artist, composer, researcher, and educator Samita Sinha draws upon experimentation and tradition to create expansive works of sound and performance. She investigates voice and vibration as bodily material for transformation, and radically evolves Indian vocal traditions to create a multivalent, contemporary language of voice and body. 

Sinha is currently researching and developing her performance, practice, and pedagogical work and their interrelationships with the support from a multi-year Arts & Culture grant from the Mellon Foundation. She has received awards from the Fulbright Foundation, National Endowment for the Arts, National Performance Network, and New York State Council on the Arts, and 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. 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.