‘Animal City’, live at Ronnie Scott’s
A second performance from the night at Ronnie’s. ‘Animal City’ was first published in The Wolf, one of the most internationally minded literary journals, edited by James Byrne. You can read the poem here on The Wolf website
Posted January 23, 2012
‘Sketching (slight return)’, live at Ronnie Scott’s
One of the highlights of the past few months was performing at Jumoke Fashola’s Jazz Verse Jukebox at London’s legendary jazz club Ronnie Scott’s. I shared the stage with some remarkable artists including Randolph Matthews and Carol Grimes. The night was special. This is a performance of ‘Sketching (Slight return)’, a poem that closes Kalagora, the book of poetry.
Posted January 18, 2012
Road to Edinburgh film
Hi and a very happy new year to you all! It’s been a while since I wrote on this site. It was a busy second half of 2011 with writing, performance, teaching, and performance-based research as a Leverhulme Fellow in Drama at Queen Mary, University of London.The year ended with an intensive two-week R&D phase with Ravi Jain of WhyNotTheatre, Toronto, with whom I’m currently developing a theatre project called Komagata Maru. It was special working all day as an actor with some great actors from the UK, Canada, Ireland, Australia, Cape Verde, and India.
After a hectic 2011, I thought that I’d start the new year with films and footage. Post-Edinburgh, Kalagora (the play) went to the Decibel showcase in Manchester, returned to London at the wonderful Rosemary Branch theatre, and closed the year out with a couple of shows in the Harold Pinter Studio at QMUL (Pinter was one of my early favourites, so this was special).
And so here’s a short film made by Kalagora co-filmmaker and video-designer, Maria Tzika, which captures the play’s journey to the Edinburgh Festival. And of course there’s the madness of the Fringe! This is for all of us who there last year and made the festival what it was: the performers, the audiences, and the city itself. Special thanks to Ansghar Hoeckh for the footage from the actual show. Hope you dig it. Love and warm wishes, Sid
Posted January 6, 2012
John O’Donoghue reviews Kalagora at Decibel
Photo by Nick Gurney
Fantastic review of Kalagora at Decibel Performing Arts Showcase at Manchester Royal Exchange Theatre by John O’Donoghue:
Bose has spoken about growing up speaking and thinking in a ‘chutnified’ mix of three languages – English, Bengali, Hindi – and this global language is Bose’s gift to the stage. Just as Shakespeare coined new words borrowed from other languages and made the stage a Pentecostal Tower of Babel so Bose has Kalagora speak a language at once as English as any Oxford Don’s, and as foreign as Bengali or Hindi might be to the same Oxford Don.
Full review at Disability Arts Online
Posted January 2, 2012
Review: Four Stars from Three Weeks
★★★★ – Three Weeks
A surreal one man show – with elements of spoken word, Bollywood music, and video clips – Siddhartha uses words and images to construct an imagined reality … his use of baroque language is like a mash-up of Allen Ginsberg and Salvador Dali.
Full review of Kalagora at Edinburgh Fringe at Three Weeks
“An extraordinary odyssey” – Sands on Kalagora
Hollywood actor Julian Sands (pictured here with his director John Malkovitch) was in the audience for Kalagora on Thursday night – and again on Friday! Then this morning, he was on BBC Radio 4 recommending his favourite Fringe shows.
This is how he described Kalagora:
“an extraordinary odyssey by Siddhartha Bose … it tells of this man’s journey from Bombay to New York and into London”
Listen to the man himself here (47 mins in).
Sands is performing at the Fringe himself, in a celebration of the poetry of Harold Pinter.
Posted August 21, 2011
