Naked – A Multimedia Excursion

NAKED is a multimedia music performance with Samita Sinha (concept/ vocals/ electronics), Marc Cary (keys/ electronics), & Dan Winckler (video) that imagines classical Indian music and ancient notions of love and devotion in a contemporary context. The piece is a meditation on desire: the desire to belong and express oneself, and the desire for love and transcendence. For children of immigrants, these desires can often be informed by questions of personal history. What of our inheritance do we preserve, what do we transform, and what is our agency in this process?

NAKED plays with these questions through Hindustani vocals—pre-fused with electronics, harmony, and global rhythms—against live-mixed video of found visuals from classic Bollywood cinema and family photographs. The show takes the nayika, the romantic heroine of classical South Asian art and metaphor for human desire, as its departure point. Using the skeleton of her story—girl falls in love, breaks rules to enjoy and endure love’s trials, and glimpses transcendence as her beloved eludes her—the show describes what a post-identity, diasporic nayika sounds and feels like.

NAKED has received support from Urban Artists Initiative/ Asian American Arts Alliance, Harlem’s Langston Hughes House and Motema Productions.

Co-sponsored by: Co-sponsored by the NYU Center for Gender & Sexuality and the Center and NYU Center for Media, Culture and History/Center for Religion and Media.