Poetry Collaborations and Live Stage Performances
Poetry rarely lives on the page alone. My work often finds its way into the arms of musicians, visual artists, and fellow storytellers to create performances that bridge the gap between spoken word and lived reality.
A poem I wrote for the musician Ali Sethi. This piece, titled 'For Ali Sethi', is an example of how my poetic work often intersects with and draws inspiration from other artists and art forms, particularly music.
About Collaborations & Stage Performances
When I collaborate, I do not just add words to a performance; I try to find where the music or the art leaves a silence, and I fill that silence with verse. Whether it is a musical reading or an accompaniment to a graphic novel, the goal is always to make the art form feel porous, letting the poem and the performance bleed into one another.
Collaboration is an act of listening. When I work with a musician or a graphic artist, I am not looking to decorate their work with poetry. I am looking for the friction, the point where their medium struggles to articulate a feeling, and that is where the poem arrives.
I have taken poetry to places it is rarely invited. From dimly lit bookstores in Delhi to gallery spaces where visuals dictate the rhythm, my performances are attempts to remove poetry from the pedestal. I want to pull it off the stage and into the bones of the audience.
Some performances are intimate, structured around a single instrument, like a guitar or a sitar, where the words follow the melody. Others are larger, interdisciplinary efforts where we weave poetry into the visual narrative of an exhibition or a live protest.
If you are a host, a musician, or a venue organizer looking for a performance that feels less like a reading and more like a conversation, let us connect. I do not follow rigid scripts. I follow the energy of the room and the intent of the collaboration. We can build something that feels temporary, raw, and entirely ours for the evening.
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