THE PUNKAWALLAH’S ROPE / Chrys Salt & Richard Ingham

Rooted in Chrys Salt’s highly regarded collection The Punkawallah’s Rope and born of her performance at the Kolkata Book Fair and an immersive month in Kolkata and North East India,  this multi-media performance explores the vibrant textures, voices, and contradictions of a continent both dazzling and daunting. Through layered poems, evocative visuals and haunting images by artist/film maker Ken Smyth, alongside instrumentals played on various Indian instruments – the tabla, the bansuri, gopi yantra by International composer, musician and saxophonist Richard Ingham the  trio pose the complex question:

How can a middle-class white woman begin to understand and engage with this most complex and challenging of continents?

Chrys Salt

Chrys started her career as an actor appearing extensively in Repertory, The West End, TV and Radio. She has written plays for theatre and radio, numbers of books, book five full poetry collections and four pamphlet collections, been translated into several languages and been set to music by various composers .She has performed UK wide, in the USA, Canada, France, Germany, Finland, India, Australia and Africa. She featured as The International Poet at The Tasmanian Poetry Festival 2019 with an adjacent tour up the Australian East Coast, was guest of honour at The Dialogia Festival in Finland August 2022 and one of seven International Poets to feature at The Kistrech International Poetry Festival in Kenya in November of the same year. She has been recipient of awards and bursaries (various) and in 2014 was awarded an MBE in the late Queen’s Birthday Honours List for Services to The Arts.

Richard Ingham

Richard Ingham is a performer, composer, conductor and educator. He has given recitals throughout the world and has worked in many UK theatres, including the Royal National Theatre. He has performed with the Royal Liverpool Philharmonic Orchestra, the Hallé Orchestra and Opera North, and in 2012 directed the acclaimed XVI World Saxophone Congress in Scotland. Richard conducted the National Saxophone Choir of Great Britain in the Czech Republic, China, Slovenia and Thailand. His direction of Miles Davis’ Birth of the Cool drew a 5* review from The Herald. He is the editor of the Cambridge Companion to the Saxophone (Cambridge University Press, 1999), widely regarded as the leading book on the subject. Broadcasts include BBC recitals, BBC R4 programmes and for Australia’s ABC Radio. He has written for orchestra, chamber ensembles, solo instruments and voices, and his compositions – have received many performances worldwide.