Ganavya Doraiswamy

Ganavya Doraiswamy © The Artist

Ganavya Doraiswamy (* New York, USA) has been called “one of the most compelling vocalists in modern music” (Wall Street Journal). She is a transdisciplinary scientist, singer, word artist and multi-instrumentalist. Born in New York and raised in Tamil Nadu, she holds degrees from the Berklee College of Music in Boston, the University of California in Los Angeles, and the Harvard University, Cambridge.

Her recent albums include “Daughter of a Temple”, a ritualistic gathering of over 30 musicians with the help of Esperanza Spalding, as well as “The Body of Reality”, co-produced by Peter Sellars.

Doraiswamy is the solo vocalist on Esperanza Spalding’s 2021 album “Songwrights Apothecary Lab”, which won the Grammy Award for Best Jazz Vocal in 2022.

She is the writer and singer of the first Tamil lyric to win a Latin Grammy (2020). She was a vocalist in Vijay Iyer’s Ritual Quartet and a soloist on the Quincy Jones-produced “Tocororo”, which reached #1 in the jazz charts.

She is currently working on an opera commission for the Festival d’Aix: The opera, directed by Peter Sellars, is based on the 2000 year old Buddhist Mahayana text Vimalakirti Sutra and the life of her grandmother Smt with a libretto by Robert Thurman, music by Doraiswamy and Sivan Eldar.

Ganavya Doraiswamy:
“My first memories in India are in a Tamil village called Cenkottai, where we lived by the waterfalls. Each house had something called the tinnai, where anyone could come sit and spend time with you. Often, we sang. Though I am not a practicing Muslim, there is something I deeply appreciate about its philosophy: there is the divine, and there is instead a preoccupation toward the image of the divine; in the same way, there is love, there is music, there is improvisation, there is encounter – and then there is the preoccupation with the image of appearing to be any of these things. The Prequel is a tinnai. It is not a preoccupation with appearing to be the image of something. It is, I hope and trust, simply the something itself.”

“No matter the language or the content, Ganavya (Doraiswamy´s) voice is a thick ephemera, like smoke as dark as ink, just coming off the fire.” (New York Times)

Heiner Goebbels

Heiner Goebbels (* Neustadt an der Weinstraße, Germany) is a musician, composer and theatre maker. He lives in Frankfurt am Main and Berlin. Goebbels is one of the most important representatives of the contemporary music and theatre scene. His compositions for ensembles and large orchestras are performed all over the world, as are his music theatre and scenic concerts.Goebbels has also created a large number of sound and video installations for the Documenta in Kassel, the Centre Pompidou in Paris and the Museo Reina Sofia in Madrid.

Julia Úlehla

Julia Úlehla (* Knoxville, USA) is a transdisciplinary performer, singer, improviser and scientist living on the Musqueam territories, a Canadian First Nation region around Vancouver. “Julia Úlehla´s artistic practice is also a type of resistance, resistance against forgetting, resistance to the museumization of traditions, but also resistance to the appropriation of folk rituals and songs for nationalist purposes. ‘I sometimes get really tired of the baggage of nationalist folk song’, Julia elaborates.”

Ludwig Wandinger

Ludwig Wandinger (* Weilheim, Germany) is a producer, drummer, performer and visual artist. He lives in Berlin. He has been playing in bands as well as producing electronic music since his youth. In 2014, he left his Bavarian home and moved to Berlin, where he studied drums at the Jazzinstitut Berlin. He has played with numerous renowned and up-and-coming cross-genre artists ever since. He has worked as a theatre musician for the Berliner Ensemble.