Mrudangam artist and composer Rajna Swaminathan and South Asian Avant-Garde bring their communities together to celebrate the release of Apertures and Vol. 2 of the SAAG literary magazine this spring. The performance will feature Vagabonds, the collaborative trio of Rajna Swaminathan (mrudangam/voice), Ganavya (voice), and Utsav Lal (piano), alongside special guest artists. Together, these artists explore nuanced encounters among South Asian music, jazz/creative music, and other modes of sounding. The music of Apertures is dedicated to the openings that allow light to flow into dark spaces— inviting us to embrace uncertainty, and moving us toward new ways of being, knowing, and channeling together. In celebrating these releases together, the artists hope to create new forms of dialogue and community around the music and the magazine as they trace intersecting paths in the world.
South Asian Avant-Garde is a literary magazine for global South Asian solidarities and activist approaches to representation. Issue 1 of Volume 2 , "Disaster Timeline" relaunches SAAG with a new website, a new column for solidarity with communities in crisis across the world. Issue 1 features activists, artists, journalists, academics, translators, and authors with dispatches, op-eds, photo-essays, portfolio features, investigative reporting, poetry and so much more: from Malé to Colombo, Cox's Bazar, Sacramento, Sittwe, Kabul, the Assam-Mizoram border, and more. It is also an attempt to think squarely about disaster, crisis, and the many difficult occurrences through a multitude of affective and artistic modes.
Rajna Swaminathan is an acclaimed mrudangam artist, composer, and scholar whose creative trajectory blossomed through a search for resonance and fluidity among musical forms and aesthetic worlds. Since 2013, she has led and composed for the ensemble RAJAS, creating expansive, boundary-breaking music with like-minded improvisers. As a composer, Rajna has been commissioned by the LA Phil, Chamber Music America, and National Sawdust, among others. She holds a PhD in Music (Creative Practice and Critical Inquiry) from Harvard University, and is currently an Assistant Professor of Music (Integrated Composition, Improvisation, and Technology) at UC Irvine's Claire Trevor School of the Arts.
: www.rajnaswaminathan.com, @rajna_music, www.saaganthology.com, @saaganthology, www.ganavya.com, @ganavya, www.utsavlal.com, @utsavlalpiano