the calcutta revival tour: origins

From our base in London, we experiment with removing the barriers between performer, audience, art form, culture - and blending different senses. How can we amplify this amazing historical music? How can we build performances of music written before 1750 as bridges to brand-new experiences? How can we reach as many people as we can?

Questions like these led us to make Calcutta, a unique theatrical show exploring period crossover between European Baroque & Indian Classical musicians in the 18th century.

After years of preparation, we revived and reinvented this show for a tour: we took an amazing cast and band to perform at the Brighton Early Music Festival on 5 November 2017, did a successful run at Tara Arts, a multicultural theatre in London, in April 2018, and took part in Brighton Refugee Week on 21 June! August brought a sold-out show in Wilton's Music Hall, followed by a debut at Leeds 2018 Opera Festival.

Birmingham’s Ex Cathedra kindly invited us to take it to Birmingham Town Hall in 2020. After being delayed for 2 years by Covid, we can’t wait to show you this brand-new adaptation by director Thomas Guthrie!

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what's the history behind the project?

We created Calcutta for the Brighton Early Music Festival's 'BREMF Live Scheme'. Our research led us to the stories of two women married to East India Company officers in the 18th century: Margaret Fowkes invited local Indian classical musicians into her front room to jam, and Sophia Plowden, who invited a European musician to write down some of the Indian tunes they played.

This should not have worked — not easily, at any rate. European and Indian Classical music are totally different musical languages. And yet it did.

That caught our imaginations. We were inspired by this early crossover between musicians, who - for a moment - were exploring blending traditions with an equal curiosity, despite the colonial context.

So we created a story of a journey, to link these different musics and histories together. We brought in puppeteers to help us travel over the sea. And we wove it through with our experiments with these jam session tunes, as well as crossover in the other direction (the song in our video is a British folksong set in Sanskrit in the late 18th century).

We won sponsorship from the Arts Council in 2009, and the end result was two beautiful sold-out evenings, including one in the vast ornate space of St. Bartholomew's Church in Brighton. We were really excited to be booked there again, as well as in Tara Arts, which puts on outstanding multicultural theatre in west London, and Wilton’s Music Hall. We then revived and respun Calcutta into an all-new adaptation that we brought to Birmingham Town Hall, thanks to the support and generosity of Jeffrey Skidmore and Ex Cathedra.