Working with new ideas, forms and aesthetics from across the world, presented within a contemporary British context
AMAYA ( Supriya Nagarajan & Duncan Chapman) , fresh from their outing at WOMAD, present an evening of vibrant music where soulful Indian vocals fuse with field recordings and imagined sounds. Some meditative pieces and some foot tapping numbers.
Look out for the new song being premiered at the ONWARDS FESTIVAL!
Date: 23 September 2023 / 7pm
Venue: Byram Arcade, Huddersfield
Manasamitra’s Artistic Director Supriya Nagarajan and Associate Artist Duncan Chapman will be taking part in Proper Job Theatre Company’s new large-scale, immersive Yorkshire adaptation of Beowulf this November.
Created especially for Kirklees Year of Music, this adaptation of Beowulf features an original score celebrating the creativity of the local musicians of Kirklees. It will be a visually inventive mix of masks, shadow puppetry and projections with a gnarled and twiggy Grendel, made by puppeteer Liz Walker, looking like a creature grown from the soil.
Brandishing torches, the performers process to St Peter’s parish church, founded in the 11th century and doubling as Heorot, the great mead hall of King Hrothgar (a sonorous Neil Balfour) who leads the
The oldest known English poem has been adapted by five Yorkshire-based poets Ian McMillan, Michelle Scally-Clarke, Joel Simmy, Chris O’Connor and Franc Chamberlain, working with composer Leighton Jones (Beware of Trains) and Supriya Nagarajan (Manasamitra), on an original score telling the story of a female Beowulf with a visually arresting, musical celebration.
Choirs will sing an original composition, transporting the audience to Heorot, the Great Mead Hall of King Hrothgar.
Suitable for all the family.
Dates: Wednesday 8 November to Friday 10 November / 7:30pm
Dates: Saturday 11 November / 5:30pm and 8pm
Venue: Start point – the Byram Arcade, Westgate, Huddersfield HD1 1ND
Book Online
Supriya Nagarajan takes a role in the amazing production of HERD, a life-affirming musical devised by composer Orlando Gough and produced by Artichoke. HERD will take place around Kirklees during July 2023 as part of Kirklees Year of Music and is a ground-breaking collaboration between artists, musicians and hundreds of schoolchildren and community members.
This musical and sculptural odyssey of epic proportions will involve a community of makers, hundreds of local schoolchildren and many hundreds more members of music groups including brass bands, bleatboxing, choral groups, boliyaan music, and many other musicians.
Over six magical days from 11 – 16 July 2023, 23 larger-than-life sheep, unlike any you’ve ever seen or heard, will appear in surprising places across the beautiful Kirklees countryside. Designed by Huddersfield-based artist Dave Young, working with heritage craft practitioners, each sheep sculpture has its own unique identity. Wired for sound, these musical sheep sculptures sing original compositions into the landscape, moving from the rural boundaries of Kirklees as they are herded towards town and city.
The epic finale will be in Huddersfield’s St George’s Square on Sunday 16 July for an immersive day of sound and music. Positioned around the square and loaded with speakers, the sheep sculptures will effectively create a surround-sound environment that the audience can hear from wherever they stand.
Alok will be reading from The Water Book and talking about “the unexpected weirdness of water and why it’s because of that weirdness that life exists on Earth”.
Water seems ordinary – it pours from our taps and falls from the sky. But you would be surprised at what a profoundly strange substance it is. It defies the normal rules of chemistry, it has shaped the Earth, its life and our civilisation. Without it, none of us would exist.
The water in our rivers, lakes and oceans all came from outer space. How it arrived here and how those molecules of water were formed is a story scientists have only learned in recent years and which takes us back to the beginning of the universe.
Alok Jha is science and technology editor at The Economist. He’s also the host of the paper’s weekly science podcast, “Babbage”.
He was science correspondent for ITN and the Guardian and has written and presented multiple TV and radio documentary series for the BBC. In 2018, he spent a year as a Wellcome fellow, developing new storytelling formats for complex topics.
He has reported from all over the world, including live from Antarctica, and is also the author of three popular science books, including The Water Book (Headline, 2015).
The evening promises a fascinating look at one of the major environmental topics of our time and continues the focus on water and the environment that has been a central part of Manasamitra’s work for the last year (Meltwater)
Date: Thursday 15 June
Time: 7:30pm
Venue: Dewsbury Town Hall, Wakefield Old Road, Dewsbury WF12 8DG
Tickets: £5 each or £7.50 for two + BF / Book Online
Telephone: 01484 225755 Monday to Friday – 9am to 5pm
E-mail: townhall.tickets@Kirklees.gov.uk
Festival of Conversations is funded by Taking the Lead, which is a Dewsbury Town Investment Plan project funded by through the Town Fund and aims to support a vibrant cultural community in Dewsbury and surrounding areas using a programme of events, skills development and participatory opportunities across music, textiles, visual arts and performance. Exploring heritage, community, culture and beyond with people living, working and studying in Dewsbury as they plan for the future together.
Join us for a wonderful, uplifting and funny evening of conversation, laughter and literature. Manasamitra is overjoyed to welcome Jay Courtney, as our second Festival of Conversations event, to read from her new book Juicy Crones and lead a conversation about the joys and challenges of being an older woman.
Honest, moving and funny, Juicy Crones is a celebration of women in later life, offering an uplifting roadmap for the quest to find new meaning, truth and purpose and redefining what it means to be an older woman.
“The average woman will live 30 years after menopause, you can have lots of fun in that time!”
Venue: Dewsbury Town Hall
Date: Friday 9 June
Time: 7:30pm
Tickets: £5 each or £7.50 for two + BF / Book Online
Telephone: 01484 225755 Monday to Friday – 9am to 5pm
E-mail: townhall.tickets@Kirklees.gov.uk
When Jay Courtney retired from her role as lead for Children’s Health and Wellbeing for Gloucestershire (Education), she did not expect to find her world so ‘beige’, nor did she anticipate the ageism and sexism she encountered.
After winning the Daily Telegraph’s ‘Just Back’ travel writing competition for her account of a solo trip to the Faroe Islands, Jay set out on a personal quest to answer existential questions about who she was as an older woman. She turned to those in the know – women who were also exploring these big questions and had found unique answers.
Thumbing her nose at the notion that post-menopausal women are ‘dried up and past their best’, in Juicy Crones Jay shares her own journey of struggle and enlightenment alongside twelve inspiring yet relatable women who, after overcoming major life challenges, have embraced their cronehood with gusto. Some of their unique paths have led literally to new destinations – opening a campsite in rural Hungary, hiking the caminos of Europe, scuba diving in Mexico, organising walking holidays for women and exploring Italy as a travel writer. Others have found those new places within themselves, connecting to music, art and nature – building physical strength or attending to spiritual growth, even flying planes! From bold leaps of faith to realising dreams, these are all stories of risk, adventure, laughter, loss and love – and, ultimately, of acceptance.
Artistic Director and CEO of Manasamitra is one of the twelve women celebrated in the book so this event has a special significance for us.
A drop-in event ahead of Dying Matters Awareness Week. You are invited to contribute to the recording of our soundscape with Duncan from Manasamitra. Please bring something you would like to share, an object, poem, photograph or memory.
Books, poems, information. Time to talk, listen and reflect.
Venue: Dewsbury Library
Date: Wednesday 3 May, 1-3pm
Book Online
This event is run in partnership with Kirkwood Hospice.
In the launch event for the Festival of Conversations, Manasamitra presents a unique In Conversation event with Dame Evelyn Glennie, mediated by Supriya Nagarajan, Artistic Director of Manasamitra. The evening will involve a fascinating dialogue exploring the wealth of Evelyn’s experience as the first full-time solo percussionist in the world and her unique approach to sound. The first half of the evening will be a traditional interview and then after an interval we will be inviting members of the audience to put their questions and thoughts to Dame Evelyn.
If you have a group that would be interested in attending and/or would like to put a question to Dame Evelyn, please contact jacqueline@manasamitra.com .
Date: Thursday 11th May
Time: 7:30pm
Venue: Dewsbury Town Hall, Wakefield Old Road, Dewsbury WF12 8DG
Tickets are available –
Telephone: 01484 225755 Monday to Friday – 9am to 5pm
E-mail: townhall.tickets@Kirklees.gov.uk
Festival of Conversations is funded by Taking the Lead, which is a Dewsbury Town Investment Plan project funded by through the Town Fund and aims to support a vibrant cultural community in Dewsbury and surrounding areas using a programme of events, skills development and participatory opportunities across music, textiles, visual arts and performance. Exploring heritage, community, culture and beyond with people living, working and studying in Dewsbury as they plan for the future together.
Photo of Dame Evelyn Glennie © Philip Rathmer (and Brigitte) – photo ref Roto-Toms & Octobans 0563
Manasamitra is delighted to announce the Launch of the Festival of Conversations 2023, with In Conversation with Dame Evelyn Glennie on 11th May 2023 at Dewsbury Town Hall.
The Festival of Conversations was originally presented as a pilot project in 2017, exploring the power of words and simple conversations between diverse communities. A series of conversations focussed on subjects and challenges that unite us, emphasising the similarities between communities rather than the differences.
The Festival was a direct response to the social environment post-Referendum that necessitated discussion, debate and conversations in the community. We worked with international sound artist Duncan Chapman, who captured sound bites from conversations in the community and combined them with field recordings from around Dewsbury town, creating a sound installation at Dewsbury Minster.
Manasamitra is excited to be developing the Festival of Conversations for Kirklees 2023. We are currently leading conversation sessions with different community groups to see what is interesting, exciting, infuriating or amusing to the local people. These topics will inform the series of talks, seminars and forum events that will form the basis of the Festival of Conversations throughout 2023.
We started festival activities in 2022, engaging communities in Kirklees, West Yorkshire and Asia with our Terrarium project, focussing on the theme of water and the impact of flood and/or drought on communities and individuals. The stories we heard influenced the creation of MELTWATER, a concert performance which took place at Dewsbury Town Hall in December 2022.
Our pre-Festival programme included:
Ralph Dartford: Dewsbury Library, November 2022
Ralph read poems from his 2 acclaimed collections, ‘Recovery Songs’ and ‘Hidden Music’ and discussed the positive relationship to be found between mental health and creative writing.
Dr Chamu Kuppuswamy: Dewsbury Library November 2022
This talk focussed on sustainability as day-to-day practice, charting the challenging journey on what is currently considered to be sustainable practice in dance costume, drawing on ancient history, manufacturing, climate economics and performance.
Meltwater: Dewsbury Town Hall December 2022
Our multi-media performance based on ice-shelf ‘calving’ and influenced by community conversations.
Meltwater: Dewsbury Minster December 2022
An evening of extracts from the full concert, discussion about the project and a special guest appearance by Dr Natasha Barlow, Associate Professor of environmental and sea-level change at the University of Leeds.
Festival of Conversations is funded by Taking the Lead, which is a Dewsbury Town Investment Plan project funded by through the Town Fund and aims to support a vibrant cultural community in Dewsbury and surrounding areas using a programme of events, skills development and participatory opportunities across music, textiles, visual arts and performance. Exploring heritage, community, culture and beyond with people living, working and studying in Dewsbury as they plan for the future together.
Watch this space for all Festival activities throughout the summer of 2023.
Further info:
Manasamitra has been commissioned by Beam, a cultural development organisation working across the North of England based in Wakefield, to deliver a commissioned project through the Dewsbury Creative Town Arts programme which is part of Kirklees Council’s Blueprint plans to revitalise the town centre. With additional support from Arts Council England, Beam is delivering a collaborative project engaging artists, residents and communities in exploring the story of Dewsbury’s changing landscape through walks, conversations, craft, design, public art and digital media.
Our new commission will enlist the help of local communities and artists to compile a digital record of Dewsbury. This will involve eliciting people’s memories of places in the town that had either personal or general significance, collecting sounds from around Dewsbury and creating a digital record of the town. This will result in a series of podcasts, designed to act as ‘virtual tour guides’ around the town, pointing out places of interest with associated personal stories or local history. Each podcast/walk will last approximately 20 minutes.
Manasamitra will be contacting local communities from early 2023 and if you are interested in being involved, contact Jacqueline at jacqueline@manasamitra.com for further details.
The project will be completed by September 2023.
Sonic Threads is an exciting and unique new duo that will launch in February 2023. Sonic Threads consists of internationally-renowned classical Indian vocalist Supriya Nagarajan and Lucy Nolan, classically-trained harpist and noted soloist in her own right.
Sonic Threads creates and performs music that is gentle, contemplative and uplifting, combining the traditions of Indian Carnatic vocals with Western contemporary classical harp music and developing their own new and unique sound. The work has been inspired by Jazz legend Alice Coltrane and her love of Indian philosophy. Blending the sound of the harp and Indian Vocals with birds and insects are some of the sounds you can expect from Sonic Threads. Supriya Nagarajan uses Indian ragas and works at exciting live improvisation with Lucy Nolan on the harp.
Recent performances include:
You can hear their music here:
Supriya Nagarajan has a unique voice in the British music scene and creates concept driven immersive music productions that push boundaries and encourage thought. She has performed across the world in various venues like the Harpa in Reykjavik, Royal Albert Hall and the Zee Jaipur Litfest music stage. Her works like Lullaby Sonic Cradle, Sound of Tea and Bollywood Jazz project have won critical acclaim and earned her a niche reputation in the UK and beyond. Her music is a blend of her South Indian classical traditions and Western contemporary styles and she has released albums under the Manasamitra label, Tokuroku and Come Play With Me.
Graduating from Oxford University and the Royal Northern College of music with Distinctions in postgraduate degrees, Lucy was the recipient of a number of prizes and a finalist in the RNCM’s Gold Medal weekend. She has been a guest artist on BBC Radio 3 and performed new music at the Hong Kong World Harp Congress, The Royal Albert Hall, TUSK festival, Huddersfield Contemporary Music Festival, Lambeth Palace, Jaipur Literature Festival and Hull City of Culture.
