(Image: Holding forth at the inaugural Auroville Literature Festival, organised by Auroville and Government of India’s Ministry of Culture)
To read her column for August in The Asian Age and the Deccan Chronicle, please click here https://www.deccanchronicle.com/opinion/columnists/190823/shreya-sen-handley-south-asian-marvels-but-can-they-last.html
The inaugural Auroville Literature Festival, celebrating Indian freedom-fighter and philosopher Sri Aurobindo’s 150th birth anniversary, organised with the Government of India’s Ministry of Culture, has “some of the best international and Indian writers and poets” participating, including author and librettist Shreya Sen-Handley, who features on their festival poster, alongside Booker Prize winning and other accomplished company.
Her two sessions include conversations about her latest book, bestselling ‘Handle With Care’ (HarperCollins 2022), longlisted for Times of India’s AutHer Awards’ Best Nonfiction Book 2023, and the acclaimed opera she co-wrote for Welsh National National Opera, ‘Migrations’ (2022), listed by both The Times and The Guardian amongst their best shows of 2022, and a talk with award-winning Australian novelist Jennifer Down.
Writers/Librettists Shreya Sen Handley and Miles Chambers join director Sir David Pountney in discussing how Welsh National Opera’s vast production ‘Migrations’ took shape. From writing the six interweaving tales, to bringing these tales to the stage and telling a universal story through opera. Please click here for the full five-minute film https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QpJQmacH0Qk&t=86s
In the run-up to its premiere, They also spoke on BBC Radio and television about it, and to various other national and international media outlets
Photo credit Olivia Rose Barns at Bromley House Library Continue reading
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Photo credit for first image: Olivia Rose Barns
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
Shreya Sen-Handley 