An exceptional year for WNO’s artistic achievements…WNO musicians and chorus, the Renewal Choir Community Chorus, a Bollywood ensemble and a children’s chorus combined to create the teeming, heart-rending staging of Migrations: six stories by six excellent writers and one clever composer.
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The UK’s longest established Asian, black and ethnically diverse-led theatre company has a new season under its new artistic director. Tara Theatre plans to return to its activist roots, with politically- charged, innovative theatre on stage, in the form of ‘2020’, a collection of monologues about the challenges of the past year. The monologues are by writers including playwright Sonali Bhattacharyya and the first Indian woman to write an international opera, Shreya Sen-Handley. They explore a range of issues as far-ranging as Trump’s America to Liverpool FC winning their 19th top flight title, the PPE scandal for care workers, and the plight of an autistic son and mother learning about themselves in the quiet of the lockdown.
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“Tara Theatre is the UK’s longest established Asian, Black and ethnically diverse led theatre company…The new works come from writers Hassan Abdulrazzak, Shahid Iqbal Khan, BBC Words finalist Amina Atiq, Erinn Dhesi, Reginald Edmund, Carlo Kureishi, Hanif Kureishi, Asif Khan, Yuqun Fan, Abhishek Majumdar, Sumerah Srivastav, Sonali Bhattacharyya (Winner of Theatre Uncut Political Playwriting Award) and Shreya Sen-Handley (recently announced as the first Indian woman to pen an international opera).”
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“The highlight was definitely the Indian Doctors, written by Shreya Sen-Handley, for a few reasons: the dancing and the change in style of the music with the addition of the sitar, the dark humour in the story, and the fact that (despite the darkness) this was one of the few lighter, more hopeful scenes in the production with the small glimpse of redemption and hope offered by the end of the scene…”
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Photo credit: Olivia Rose Barns at Bromley House Library
“Conductor Matthew Kofi Waldren, director Sir David Pountney, composer and jazz pianist Will Todd, and six brilliant librettists were at the forefront of the collaborative giant…
This work represents revolutionary operatic theater, using six librettists, two composers, four directors, and an appreciably large team of dedicated individuals and creatives. It could very well reframe how opera is created going forward. Instead of utilizing a singular story or plot, a unique “theme” drew each of the six meta-narratives together and helped form a cohesive parable told from multiple angles….
“Take six stories, six librettists, an enormous cast including children and set it all to music. Stir vigorously. Add a flock of small birds, flapping, dancing and singing in search of their breeding ground. With an interlocking narrative crisscrossing history, from the pilgrim fathers to Bollywood, Enoch Powell’s rivers of blood speech and Indian doctors in the NHS of the 1960s, the African Caribbean slave trade in 18th-century Bristol, a new oil pipeline in rural Canada, English lessons for refugees and, for good measure, a space rocket, Welsh National Opera’s Migrations could have been an unholy mess. At its world premiere at the Millennium Centre, Cardiff, on Wednesday, it was anything but. Continue reading
“….Love and sleeping arrangements have always gone hand in hand. We ‘sleep together’ in every sense of the phrase when we get hitched. But sleeping habits have as much to do with health, history, culture and economics.
The size of our beds has grown over the ages, and that’s as much about evolution as it is about socioeconomics. Humans are larger today than at any other time in history, having soared four inches in height in prosperous countries in the last century. Breadthwise too there’s been abundant efflorescence, with global obesity tripling in the last five decades.
Yet, peek into one of the many beautifully preserved historic homes in Britain, and the beds you see are bijou for other reasons…”
Published in the Asian Age and the Deccan Chronicle, please read the article in full here
“In September 2022, Five Leaves Bookshop started its (online) journey around the world’s UNESCO Cities of Literature with a visit to Québec City. One of the cities on the tour was Nanjing in China, where Shreya Sen-Handley met Ding Jie.
Both writers are multi-talented – Shreya has written in many formats including memoir, poetry, fiction, plays, opera, and journalism. She has also illustrated children’s books. Ding Jie is not only a novelist, but he is also a fine artist.
Nanjing UNESCO City of Literature were kind enough to ship us some physical prints of Ding Jie’s paintings to hang in the bookshop, and they’ve also sent us digital images of those and others. As Shreya is no mean artist herself, we thought it would be fitting to host an online gallery of both their work…”
This was followed by an exhibition of Shreya’s artwork alongside Ding Jie’s in Nanjing, China!
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Shreya Sen-Handley 